Philosophy

Philosophy in Prep is all about developing basic thinking skills. The first and most important skill that we started with this year was questioning, and we spent a bit of time sorting out the difference between an question and a statement.

Some of the first questions that we came up with were:

• Why do volcanoes blow up?

• Why does petrol make cars go?

• Why do textas have ink?

• How do clocks tell the time?

• How do cars move?

• How do computers work on the plane?

• How do humans work?

• Who am I?

After exploring questions for a while, we have now started on our Community of Inquiry.  We follow a model based on the Philosophy for Children (P4C) framework that uses picture storybooks as stimulus to inspire children's curiosity.  

One of our first inquiries was based around The Bunyip of Berkley's Creek.  After reading the story together, the children came up with some questions that the book provoked. These included:

• Who looks like me?

• What do Bunyips look like?

• What do I look like?

• Why are Bunyips black?

• Why is the Bunyip sad?

• Do Bunyips exist?

We voted on 'Why is the Bunyip Sad?' as our question to explore. Here are a few of the things that we came up with in discussion:

"It didn’t have any friends"

"Because no one liked him, they thought he was ugly"

"Because it wanted another one"

"It didn’t know what it was"

o   How do you know what you are?

"You’re a person because you have 2 arms and legs"

"Bunyips don’t exist

o   How do you know bunyips don’t exist?

"You can’t see any"

"If they’re invisible they can’t exist"

·        So if something is invisible does that mean it doesn’t exist?

"I don’t know but I think [so]"

After some discussion a few children started to disagree about whether or not the bunyip was real, and how they knew they were right.  How do you know?  is one of the most important questions we use.  Here are a couple of the children's descriptions of how they know about the world.

"It’s in your head and your eyes and comes down to your mouth"

"That’s right, your brain tells you everything"