In Search of Silence

As you can imagine, a classroom filled with 20 children does not offer very much silence. In both the morning and afternoon classes, a few of the children were asking their classmates to "stop talking" "just wait for a second" and "listen." I found that they were not requesting this so that their own voices could be heard, but instead they were searching for something else. When I asked them what they were listening to when no one was talking their answers ranged from "peace" to "I'm tired of hearing talk" to "quiet." 

We are currently in the early stages of an inquiry unit on sound, so the absence of sound or silence became a related path for us to follow. Many of the children had ideas about what silence was, such as "Silence is when there is nothing, only you."

This led us on a search to find silence. 

When trying to find silence inside our classroom, we were interrupted by the noises in the classrooms and hallways surrounding us. Wondering if silence were to be found somewhere else in the school, we began our hunt. 

We could not find silence in the school. Instead we heard the sounds of people walking, talking and moving and the school's heating and ventilation systems. We also heard sounds we could not locate and this led us into the unexplored second floor of the school where the big kids are! Here, we were able to see construction and hear its sounds.

Unable to find silence inside of the school, one of the children said, "Maybe silence is outside?" While outside we again closed our eyes and opened our ears. We heard the wind moving, birds tweeting and cars beeping.

Some parts of the school yard had even less silence than others. Near the front of the school we were annoyed, and intrigued, by the amount of sound trucks were making as they backed into the parking lot!

In the end, we were not able to find silence. Despite this, during our search, the children were so focused on listening to the environment around them that they were able to isolate many different sounds that regularly go unnoticed. This has led them now to think about sounds more intently and the ways in which they are created.