12/06/2026
We spent our student free day working with Jo to further extend our knowledge on inquiry and the possibilities that can occur when we listen to the child and meet them at their thinking.
Thankyou for your insight into the learning of the cat that lives at the museum in Port Broughton that the children wondered if it could survive without love?
The Midnight Cat: Moving from Knowing to Understanding
What happens when we shift our questions from what children know to what children understand?
What happens when we move beyond asking children to recall information and instead invite them to interpret, theorise, and make meaning?
Something changes.
Learning begins to move.
It becomes less about answers and more about possibilities.
Less about facts and more about relationships.
Less about what is known and more about what might be understood.
This shift often occurs when we move beyond the walls of the "classroom" and into the local place and community. When children encounter the world directly, they begin to notice things we may never have anticipated. They ask questions we would not have thought to ask. They see connections that sit beyond our assumptions as educators.
The challenge for us is to listen.
Not for the answers we expect to hear, but for the theories children are constructing.
Not for confirmation of what we have taught, but for evidence of how they are making sense of the world.
When we document and share these dialogic encounters, learning becomes visible. We begin to see children moving from naming to interpreting, from knowing about the world to making meaning of it.
Perhaps this is where the Midnight Cat enters—quietly inviting us to look again, notice what we have overlooked, and follow the questions that emerge.
For it is often in these moments that the deepest learning occurs: not when children tell us what they know, but when they reveal how they understand.
The childs question:
Can a cat (seemingly lost) survive without love?
Thank you for the story, shared Holly Bowey Port Broughton Kindergarten South Australia
