The Evolution Of The Tree Part Toys

Any of you who followed this blog over the summer know I got on a kick of making toys and art from the laurel, hemlock and cedar branches I was pruning from my yard.

Some, like the cookie tree and the tree blocks have since proven themselves in the outdoor classroom, their popularity ebbing and flowing, but getting used regularly and pretty much as I'd expected. The kids have developed some "looping" techniques for hanging the cookies, which is an innovation that takes a lot more concentration than just hanging them in a vertical chain . . .

. . . and many of the tree blocks have become part of the "loose parts" that bestrew the space, turning up in all kinds of places . . .

The bottle bush has had a rockier experience in the classroom. The kids, especially the younger ones, enjoy decorating it, and it seems to offer just the right amount of challenge, but the branches have proven to be a bit brittle, requiring lots of repair jobs . . .

You can see the hardened repair glue oozing out like sap.

. . . and I've never quite been able to shake my nervousness about broken bottles. We've only so far lost one blue vase, which was made of thinner glass than the bottles, but I'm never quite able to relax when the bottle bush is out, so it doesn't get out of the storage room as often as it needs to in order to ultimatelly earn a permanent spot in our limited space. I think if I could figure out a way to temporarily install it in the sand pit, with its softer landing zone, I'd feel better. I'm not giving up yet, but time is running short.

The tree part balancers are fun, especially for the older kids, but I've discovered they're best used as part of more organized group activities. If they're just left out for the kids to find, they have a tendency to be pulled apart and repurposed for all kinds of other things. I put too much work into them for that, so I'm going to try them out as part of our Pre-K science explorations, and perhaps has part of one of our table toys stations.

That said, by far the biggest disappointment up to now has been the performance of the tree part construction set. I'd created it in my garage with high hopes.

It seemed to offer limitless possibilities . . .

. . . and it wasn't entirely ignored when it appeared in the outdoor classroom . . .

But the truth is that it was simply too small for the wide open spaces of outdoors. The parts got scattered, repurposed, and lost quite quickly out there, and to be honest we have plenty of other objects that can serve the same purpose as these pieces, so I've had it packed away for awhile.

Last week I reintroduced it as an indoor table top toy with much more satisfying results.

Of course, I think that combining it with our Pacific Northwest native animal set really helped get the kids involved with it.

When I make these things, I always have an idea of what they'll do with them, but I also know I need to let the kids really show me how to play with them. I'd assumed this was a construction set, and it is, but what has really impressed me is how the kids are spontaneously using it for exploring sorting, matching, sets building, and other mathematic activities.

It's fun, and sometimes a challenge, to watch the toys evolve.

Foam Paint

People ask me quite often why it is that I became a teacher. I have several different answers, all of which are an aspect of the truth, and most of which pivot upon the idea that I've never cared what I did professionally, just so long as I got to be surrounded by brilliant minds, and there are none more brilliant than those of young children.

Deep down, however, in the recesses of truth that I only occasionally allow to bubble to the surface, the real reason is that I want to play with their toys, and none more so than foam paint. Essentially, it's colored shaving cream, which the 3-5's can mix-up for themselves (for much less, I might add), but with the benefit of it not stinging the eyes when it inevitably goes there. That's why I buy it exclusively for use by the Pre-3 class, because every time I've ever tried shaving cream with 2-year-olds (and it's only happened twice) I wind up with a classroom full of weeping children who need their eyes flushed with water.

Typically, only 4-5 of the 20 or so kids in the class intentionally allow the stuff to touch their actual hands, however, and maybe another 4-5 are willing to touch it with the various "tools" we make available for manipulating the stuff. The rest have a tendency to either ignore it entirely, or hover around the edges, watching, but refusing all invitations to belly up to the table. 

Ah, but this year's crop of 2-year-olds is asserting its uniqueness early. From the very start they kept Suriya's mom Aya busy re-charging their trays with more and more paint to mash and mix. That's the art form as we do it at Woodland Park. I always have paper handy, just in case someone wants to try making a print of their rainbow mess, but what you see here in the pictures are finished works. Usually we don't even wipe off the trays between artists.

Check out that little green hand in the upper right corner of this picture!

Most of the kids started with a tool of some sort, but very quickly ditched them in favor of fingers, hands, and even arms, to swirl and blend the colorful mess in front of them. There's not usually much talk amongst 2-year-olds, so there's plenty of empty aural space in which adults can judiciously drop descriptive and informative statements about what we see happening, providing vocabulary, adding perspective, and giving evidence that what they are doing is being noticed, without taking over the project with our adult directions, questions, or small talk.

It's early in the school year and our team of parent-teachers is still learning

the ropes, but I love how much physical space the kids have here, with adults

present, but staying on the periphery.

Most years, I spend a lot of time with my own hands in the paint, working to lure more children into the activity, but they didn't need me. The table was pretty much slammed throughout the morning, leaving little space for Teacher Tom, who very much wanted to play with the foam paint. Fortunately, there will be a next time.

Fairness And Democracy In Action

A couple days ago my Australian colleagues Sherry and Donna at Irresistible Ideas For Play Based Learning posted about reading The Little Red Hen and how they augment it with finger puppets knitted to look just like the characters from the book. We don't have the finger puppets, but we do have the book, so we read it in the Woodland Park 3-5's class. Now, I'm sure the puppets would help with this, but I always forget between readings just how challenging the message of this story is to some preschoolers.

For those of you who don't know this old folk tale, the Little Red Hen does all the household work, while the Goose, Cat, and Dog (in our version) each decline to help out, saying, "Not I," each time she asks. When she finds a grain of wheat to plant, her lazy housemates continue to say "Not I" as she does the work of tending, harvesting, threshing, milling and finally baking a loaf of bread. The big finish is that when the Hen asks the others if they will help her eat the freshly baked bread, they all say "I will," only to find that the long-suffering Hen has decided that since she did all the work, she gets to eat all the bread.

As I read this story last week, some of the kids were moved to remark, "That's not fair," each time the lazy characters said, "Not I." Others commented, both proudly and maybe a little defensively, something along the lines of, "I help at my house." 

(Sena was one of the kids who let us know that she's a helper. I know for a fact, it's true. Her mother Ann wrote me a while back to say that as she brought water to the table for her big sister Ava, she said, "Here's your martinis dry.")

But the concept of fairness is not always an easy one for preschoolers. When we got to the end of the story, with the Little Red Hen eating all the bread herself, there arose a chorus of "That's not fair!" and "She should share with them!" and "They'll be hungry!" I took a moment to clarify the moral of the story, trying to get them to identify with the poor overworked Hen, but I got push back in the form of, "Maybe they were too tired to help" and "Maybe they were too busy to help." I'm guessing that many of the kids saw the Hen as a parental figure and the others as children, rather than it being a household of peers as the story is intended. And yes, it would be something of an outrage for a parent to withhold bread from a child, even a lazy one. Whatever the case, the point was missed by some of the children. That's probably true of most things we try to teach about social relations, which is why we have to revisit these kinds of things over and over, from many different angles, during the course of years, before it sinks in.

Really learning about fairness takes lots of practice. Board games are a fun way to work on those skills. I was fascinated last week while watching this group of boys playing the game Barnyard Bingo.

They were a self-selected group including two 3-year-olds and two 4-year-olds.

The centerpiece of the game is a barn that dispenses colored "coins" one at a time. The official idea is to take turns removing the coins and matching them by color to your own "fence." The first one to collect all 3 coins is the "winner." 

These guys were playing it their own way. Instead of starting the game with the barn full of all the coins, each boy held the 3 coins that matched his fence. 

When his turn came around, he would insert his 3 coins, then remove them one by one, before passing the barn along to the next player. There is no "winner" in this version -- the whole point being to take turns dropping coins into the top, then removing them from the bottom.

There were no adults involved in this game, and yes, there were some conflicts over whose turn it was, how long turns should take, and even which direction they were going around the table. There were flares of anger and a bit of grabbing, but I am proud of how these boys worked through their challenges mostly with words. (I am equally proud of all us adults who stayed out of it.)

But there were kindnesses as well, and concessions, and giving up on strongly held opinions for the good of the game. No matter how many rules about fairness we make, they remain nothing more than aspirational statements in the absence of a fundamental understanding of fairness: these are the skills necessary for every day fairness in the world beyond the benevolent dictatorship of family.

Looking at these pictures, I feel blessed to have been witness to this moment of preschool fairness and democracy in action.

A Tutorial On Playing With Cardboard Boxes

It's the first full week of school, so of course that means we have plenty of packing material around, what with the all the new lockers, outdoor storage cabinetry, and curriculum supplies. 

We pretty much just threw it out into what we call the block area, mainly because we have nowhere to store all those boxes and foam packaging bricks.

We added some cardboard tubes, our every day cars, and a dozen tennis balls for good measure. Oh, we had us some fun.

Yep, we had a motivated parent-teacher working the station. That always helps. Charlotte's mom Renee was inspired in her role as the "block parent."

She asked for tape.

A feat of engineering; experiments in physics.

I told her she was brilliant and she replied, "Well, I haven't had much sleep."

But boxes, tubes, balls and cars, frankly, can get a bit limiting all by themselves, which is why we needed to add markers.

Art is essential to any worthwhile community endeavor.

We also broke out a box cutter, as you can see, for the adult 

to wield upon request.

Getting into the boxes is, naturally, a highlight.

Negotiating small spaces is one of the ways we learn about ourselves in

relationship with others.

He kept begging me to tip the box "up" while he sat in it.

I said, "I'm worried you'll be hurt." He said, "Go slow and

I won't." I began to tip the box up very slowly. A look of

panic crossed his face for a moment, but then he landed in

the bottom of the box. Look at that face. These are the

rewards that come from letting children take part in their

own risk assessment.

We made up some cool games.

They played this game together for a good 20 minutes. Holy cow!

All this great cooperative play and it's only our first full week of school. I see great things in this class's future.

Seriously, the cardboard box absolutely belongs in the Toy Hall Of Fame. 

If You Can Make A Box, You Can Make Anything

When you think about it, it's amazing how much of the man-made world is constructed from boxes.

Cabinets are essentially boxes, as are book shelves, drawers, foot lockers, storage containers, and pretty much everything else in which we "keep" our things things.

Tables are based on box construction, as are chairs and bed frames.

My sink is a kind of box, as is the fridge, stove, and microwave.

Our cars, buses and trains are based upon the concept of boxes.

Stairs, closets, nooks, rooms, and entire houses are boxes.

What could be a better thing than to teach preschoolers how to build their own rectangular prisms? With that skill under their belts, what couldn't they accomplish?

So it was with some small, rectangular plywood scraps, a supply of which we've been living off since Keira and Aiden's mom Lynn donated them several years ago, that we set to work. Now, I've been watching young children drive nails almost daily for the past 6 months and while most of them manage it quite well, fully driving a single nail can take a lot of time and effort, and successfully building a box was going to take a minimum of 12 nails. A few weeks ago, Dennis' dad Terry suggested that it might be fun to occasionally create a kind of woodworking "kit" construction project by having an adult precut wood and pre-drill holes, by way of speeding up the process for kids, too many of whom were giving up on or scaling down their original magnificent visions after encountering 10 minutes of working on a single nail. Since our wood scraps were already cut to a standard size, all I had to do was halve a few of them to serve as ends, then drill holes in the corners of the pieces where the nails would go. The kids would still need to do some real hammering, but it was with smaller nails than we'd been using, and into the sides of plywood, which I figured would give way to their 7 oz. hammers fairly easily.

I love the cooperative school model for a lot of reasons, but as a teacher, there is no greater luxury than to be able to provide ample adult support for complex projects like this. For most of the session there were at least two adults on their knees beside the work bench, and often 3, assisting 3-4 kids at a time in their efforts. We found that despite the pre-drilled holes it was still useful to start the nails for the kids, but after that they could do the rest.

I'd originally thought we could use our vices and clamps to hold the pieces in place as the kids hammered, but with all those adult hands available, we sped thing up by holding them ourselves.

Hammering nails is tricky business. There is a balance one must strike between power and accuracy. Not a single child began by erring on the side of power yesterday, which has been my experience throughout the time I've been doing woodworking with children. There is a knee jerk idea out there that putting a hammer into the hands of preschoolers is a recipe for mayhem, and maybe there is a rare kid who would just start smashing, but personally I've yet to encounter a child who didn't approach the task with focus and concentration. You'll notice, for instance, that many of them use a two-handed technique.

This is done to achieve accuracy, not power. In fact, more often than not, I find I need to encourage the kids to swing their hammers harder in order to get the nails to budge. This means a few more misses, including a few that caught my own fingers, but the direct hits were more successful.

This was no "drive-by" project. These 3 and 4 year-olds stayed focused and working for a good 5-15 minutes each in order finish their box. That's a long time to maintain concentration in a busy, noisy classroom, full of all kinds of potential distractions.

Not every child took the time, nor had the interest. Their day will come. But the ones who did were rightfully proud of their accomplishment.

Some of them painted their boxes, while others ran around gathering loose parts with which to fill them. And if you look carefully at this picture, you'll see something else we learned. You'll notice the nail in the lower left corner was bent before it was entirely driven. Instead of pulling it out and starting over, we just hammered it flat, using the "That'll hold" technique known to woodworkers around the globe.

And now that we can build a box, we're ready to join in the universal project of building the rest of the world.

Contributing To Our Community Conversation

Circle Time in the Woodland Park 3-5's class is our daily children’s community meeting. Yes, we do the traditional singing, dancing, and picture book reading, but learning to engage in a group discussion is what it’s really all about.

Participation is key. For some kids, the challenge is learning to stop “participating” long enough for the other children to get a word in edgewise. For others, the notion of raising a hand, waiting to be called on, then speaking in front of such a large group, can be intimidating.

My 3-year-old friend Josephine (as differentiated from my 12-year-old daughter Josephine) was one of the latter. She participated in the singing and dancing, and was clearly engaged with the reading, but she preferred listening over speaking.

It took a few months, but one day she raised her hand to indicate that she wanted to compliment a friend. I called, “Josephine has something to say.” We held eye contact for a moment and I understood that this was really only about hand raising -- one thing at a time.

I asked, “Do you want me to call on you later?” She nodded.

For several weeks thereafter we went through this ritual whenever we were giving compliments or making rules, each time ending with our agreement to do this again next time. And then, out of the blue, I called her and she answered as if it was nothing special, “Heart Monkey is in my cubby.” Josephine still never became one of the regular contributors, but she gamely tried out rule making, compliment giving, and freelance public speaking over the course of the rest of the year.

Similarly, when it came to storytelling Josephine’s process told a more interesting story than the tales themselves.

It took a few months before she approached me as I was collecting stories to read later at Circle Time. When I asked if she wanted a turn, she shook me off. She just wanted to listen to the other kids tell their stories.

For several weeks thereafter we went through the same ritual whenever we were telling stories. Then one day when I asked, “Do you want to tell a story to read at Circle Time?” she nodded. I wrote her name on the list. When her turn came we held eye contact for a moment and I understood that this was really only about getting her name on the list – one thing at a time.

Then a few weeks later, she told this story:

Humity, humity, humity.

When it was time to read it at Circle Time, Josephine came forward without hesitation, smiled into the audience as I introduced it, then laughed as I carefully recited her words, “Humity, humity, humity.”

There is was only one other story in the Josephine file from that year:

Coma, cama, coma,

Coma Como Como coma.

Hm hm hm hm hm hm,

Hm hm hm hm hm hm hm.

Gunk gunk gunk gunk gunk.

When I read that one, she was not making eye contact with me at all, because she was too busy looking at the audience. And I already knew that her storytelling was really only about standing at the front of the class while Teacher Tom reads.

As a 4-year-old Josephine was the very first child to step forward and tell a story that year. She was never the most chatty child on the blue rug, but she was always in the conversation, making rules, giving compliments, and daily contributing to our community conversation.

(Reposted from 7/25/09, with revisions)