Safety Play

Yesterday's post included a set of photos of a boy playing around under the swings as a classmate was swinging. It wasn't a particularly risky activity in my view. I mean, I was standing right there, taking pictures, discussing it with him, and it didn't set off any alarm bells for me in the moment, although after the fact, while going through them, it occurred to me that it was something that would be scuttled in other settings. My lack of concern probably stems from the fact that it's far from the first time this sort of thing has happened:

In fact, I think what caught my attention about it was that it was the first time I'd seen a kid do more than just lie there giggling. Of course, many schools have removed their swings altogether, so maybe the very existence of swings is shocking to some. 

I imagine that in some dystopian future we'll become notorious for being the only school left with a swing set, let alone for not having a set of rules about how the kids can use them. That's because, in our five years with swings, since our move to the Center of the Universe, we've not found a need for safety rules, because the kids, the ones that live in the world outside our catastrophic imaginations, haven't shown a particular propensity to hurt themselves or one another.

Oh sure they get hurt like all kids do, like all people, but most of the injuries don't come from what people call "risky play," but rather from day-to-day activities, things you would think children had mastered. For instance, the worst injury we've seen during my 15 year tenure at Woodland Park came when a boy fell on his chin while walking on a flat, dry, linoleum floor. He needed a couple stitches. Another boy wound up with stitches when he fell while walking in the sandpit. 

Increasingly, I find myself bristling when I hear folks talk about "risky play," even when it's framed positively. From my experience, this sort of play is objectively not risky, in the sense that those activities like swinging or climbing or playing with long sticks, those things that tend to wear the label of "risky" are more properly viewed as "safety play," because that's exactly what the kids are doing: practicing keeping themselves and others safe. It's almost as if they are engaging in their own, self-correcting safety drills.

When a group of four and five year olds load up the pallet swing with junk, then work together to wind it up higher and higher, then, on the count of three, let it go, ducking away as they do it, creating distance between themselves and this rapidly spinning flat of wood that they've learned is libel to release it's contents in random directions, they are practicing keeping themselves and others safe. They don't need adults there telling them to "be careful" or to impose rules based on our fears because those things are so manifestly necessary to this sort of thing that they are an unspoken part of the play.

When children pick up long sticks and start employing them as light sabers, swinging them at one another, they are practicing keeping themselves and others safe. The safety is built into it.

When children wrestle they are practicing caring for themselves and their friends.

When preschoolers are provided with carving tools and a pumpkin they automatically include their own safety and that of others into their play. Adult warnings to "be careful" are redundant at best and, at worst, become focal points for rebellion (which, in turn, can lead to truly risky behavior) or a sense that the world is full of unperceived dangers that only the all-knowing adults can see (which, in turn, can lead to the sort of unspecified anxiety we see so much of these days). Every time we say "be careful" we express, quite clearly, our lack of faith in our children's judgement, which too often becomes the foundation of self-doubt.

The truth is that they already are being careful. The instinct for self-preservation is quite strong in humans. It's a pity that we feel we must teach them to live within our catastrophic imaginations.

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"I'm Working Soooo Hard And Learning Soooo Much!"

As the parent of a school aged child, I was steadfast in my commitment to not "help" her with school unless she asked for it. Many of her classmates' parents thought I was a jerk for not tearing through her backpack and notebooks each night in search of forgotten homework or for not making her bring textbooks along on vacations or for answering, "I don't know," when they asked how she was doing in school. Of course, I took an interest in the things she wanted to talk with me about at the end of her day, which usually had something to do with her social life or, increasingly as she got older, the theater or one her literature or humanities courses.

This guy set himself the task of retrieving a piece of wood and a pair of stick ponies that were under the swing set without asking his classmate to stop swinging. It was a project of about five minutes, during which he tested his theories on how to go about it, while making a study of the swinger's arc, momentum, and trajectory. It required planning, timing, calculated risk, concentration, and perseverance.

Her grades were not bad by and large, and when she brought home a stinker, it was typically because she found the subject or the teaching of the subject uninspiring, a totally valid excuse in my book, especially since there were alway some classes on her schedule that did inspire her. And in those classes, the grades didn't matter to any of us either: it was enough that she was excited about learning, rendering grades all but irrelevant. I'm proud of having stuck to this approach, especially now, as my child is setting out on her university career where she is saying things like, "I'm working soooo hard and learning soooo much!" That's exactly what I would wish for her.

It sometimes seems like it's a rare commodity, this love of learning, especially among middle and high schoolers, who more often than not trudge through their days, being told what, how, and when to learn. You don't have to be Freud to figure out why so many of them hate school. As Peter Gray, the author of Free To Learn, writes: "School is prison."

If there is a goal for our schools, it should at least be to do no harm. I would be happy if they did nothing else. Every child is born with a passion for learning. Every child I've ever met, when left to her own devices, demonstrates a joyful, eager, unquenchable capacity to learn. The science is clear: humans are designed to educate ourselves through what we call play, in pursuit of our passions, yet our schools could not be more perfectly designed to squelch that instinct and replace it with a sort of nose-to-the-grindstone, stress-fest, full of evenings of homework and weekends of tutors, all in the name of tests and grades, which everyone knows is the currency needed to pay your way into a "good" university, which in turn is a downpayment for a solid middle class job, never mind that those jobs are disappearing right along with the middle class. We're destroying our kids -- for nothing:

And for what purpose, all this pressure? The presumed holy grail of all K-12 education in the United States is hardly a love for learning or an authentically engaged citizen. It is, against all odds, a "yes" message from one of a handful of expensive, brand-name universities that only a fraction of each year's three million high school graduates will be invited to attend . . . Whipped into a panic by hypercompetitive admissions practices and by hype, kids, parents, and educators pursuing that holy grail sacrifice terribly important things: time, money, health, happiness, and childhood itself. Without our even realizing it, our driving goal has become all about preparing for the college application, not preparing for the college experience or life beyond. Performing, not learning. Amassing credentials, not growing. Not even really living.

And it can't really even be called education. It's more about learning to perform to a standard (as filmmaker Vicki Abeles points out in the excellent Salon essay from which I quoted above) than actually learning anything.

There is nothing that saddens me more than to see a child's light extinguished to be replaced by the dim flicker of joyless rote: it's hard work only because it's such an unnatural way for anyone to learn anything. Much better is when we're working hard because we're passionate about what we're learning, which is how it happens in our little play-based preschool.

People often ask how children from our school do when they enter more traditional kindergartens. The short answer is that they do just fine. In other words, they don't struggle because we've not sufficiently pre-ground their noses. What I do find is that parents often struggle as they watch their child's love of learning be slowly replaced by homework, textbooks, tutors, tests, and grades. I take my motivation in knowing that we are giving them the best early years childhood we know how. As Sydney Guerwitz Clemons said, "We don't starve to prepare for a famine . . . We fatten them up to the best of our ability and hope they survive."

Our children, however, deserve more than mere survival, and, make no mistake, it's not just the schools doing it to them: parents are doing it to our kids as well, filling up what little time they have left with lessons and teams and classes, pressuring them on grades, tearing through their backpacks looking for forgotten homework. We can stop doing it and we can insist that our schools stop doing it.

An Ivy League education is wonderful, but most of us live rich, satisfying lives without it: we can't let 13 years of our children's lives be about that. Our children deserve more than hard work in the test score coal mines; what they deserve is the freedom to work soooo hard because they are learning soooo much. Our children deserve a childhood.

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"Anything Goes"

Earlier this week, I mentioned our "dangerous" blocks, those over-sized foam things that are covered in vinyl in the manner of gym mats. We've been playing with them this week. As a teacher in a cooperative school, one of the luxuries I have is to be able to assign a parent-teacher to each of our classroom stations. In preparing our "block parents" this week, I've explained the potential hazards of these blocks, their tendency to tempt some children into out-of-control, body hurling play, the kind that drives all but the most thrill-seeking children from the area, not to mention the bonked heads, split lips, and claustrophobia-induced shrieks of children who find themselves trapped under a pile of blocks by a classmate who just couldn't help himself. 

Next week, we'll have an opportunity for the children who choose to engage with the blocks in this way to do so, but this week, in the interest of both safety and inclusivity, I've been providing our parent-teachers with a fairly long list of tips and cautions as they've begun their session as "block parent." Now please understand that we're a school that includes wrestling as a regular part of it's curriculum, so we're not, I don't think, particularly prone to hysteria when it comes to run-of-the-mill childhood injuries or rough-and-tumble play. Believe me, I would not prepare the parent-teachers like this if I'd not found it necessary.

After I'd prepared a parent-teacher earlier in the week, a veteran parent, one who has been with our school for four years now, overheard my spiel as she dropped off her son. She said to me, "I remember the first time I was responsible for these blocks. I thought, 'Oh, it's Teacher Tom's class -- anything goes. I had a miserable day.'"

I think that's a common misunderstanding that those looking in from the outside have about the sort of play-based curriculum one finds at schools like ours. For many, when they hear about a child-lead preschool that strives to operate on democratic principles, one that permits wrestling and other sorts of risky play, where children make all their own rules, where questioning authority is encouraged, and where obedience is discouraged, they envision a kind of dog-eat-dog, law-of-the-jungle free-for-all where only the strong survive. 

I'll be the first to confess that we sometimes walk that line, but the reality is that we rarely cross it.

On the one hand, we make clear that the parent-teachers' primary responsibility is keeping the children safe: not necessarily in the institutional sense with lots of adult-imposed rules or systemic safety procedures, but rather in the much more effective manner of having plenty of eyes on the play and relying upon our situational judgement to know when to step in with something like, "I can't let you hurt yourself or other people," and when to stay out of it.

On the other hand, we strive to empower the children with the knowledge that they are responsible for their own community: that they can speak up when they don't like what's happening; that they can advocate for themselves and others; that they can negotiate and make agreements with one another about how everyone is to be treated. This is the core of a play-based curriculum: practicing the skills required to be a satisfied, conscientious, and productive member of a community.

Yesterday, one of our five-year-olds declared himself a "bad guy." A half-dozen kids took him up on it. They walled-off our playhouse, fashioning it into a jail and were determined to put him in there where bad guys belong. It was a game that incorporated equal parts chasing, grabbing, wrangling, and wrestling. I stayed out of it, but watched their faces for signs of distress, especially that of the bad guy who, while one of our oldest kids, is also one of the slightest. It was the sort of rambunctious game that might lead outsiders to think "anything goes." As I tracked the play, I stayed focused on facial expressions. It was a game that I'm certain would have been scuttled in traditional settings.

Then, as it happened, a grabbing hand connected with a dodging head. A cry went up, and everyone stopped. They went from rough housing to concern in a flash. All eyes went to the injured child. Not a single one of them looked around for an adult, even though their play had attracted the attention of a couple of others besides myself, and who, like me, kept their distance. Two children asked, "Are you okay?" One put his arm around the bad guy's shoulder. They stood this way for a good minute, studying their friend's face as I had been doing, responding to the look of pain they saw there, striving to comfort him.

Then, as suddenly as he had stopped playing, the bad guy said, "I'm okay," and started to run. The good guys grabbed at his jacket, out of which he deftly wiggled, and the game was on. As they raced up the hill I noticed that one of the good guys continued to carry the jacket, not wanting to just drop it on the ground. She found a grown-up and handed it over for safe-keeping before chasing off after the bad guy.

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We Acted Like A Community

I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not an occupational therapist (OT). I'm a teacher, which brings with it a perspective that makes largely moot some of what those other professionals struggle with. For instance, I don't care so much whether or not "sensory processing disorder" (SPD) or ADHD or autism are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is the book to which these folks turn when forming a diagnosis. For instance, there is currently a debate within the overlapping worlds of various clinicians about whether or not SPD ought to be a stand-alone diagnosis or if the symptoms are simply a sign of some other underlying, officially diagnosable, disorder. It's interesting, I suppose, to read about, but it's not particularly helpful to me as a teacher in a preschool classroom, a place in which every child exhibits odd, quirky, and even outright bizarre behavior at one time or another. What I do care about is when I have a child in my care who is behaving in ways that are hurtful to himself or others.

Several years ago, we had a boy in our summer program who had already been identified as "gifted." Within the first 5 minutes of playing with him, I thought, and he's on the autism spectrum. When he was later diagnosed with Aspergers, I told his mom, "I thought so." 

She asked in disbelief, "Why didn't you tell me?"

I replied by saying that it was just a gut thing, that after such limited exposure I couldn't have possibly known, that I'm not qualified to make a diagnosis, and, that I wasn't about to bring up such emotionally charged words as "autism" willy nilly. But the main part of my answer was, "It didn't matter." He was fully engaged and not hurting anyone. You see, being "disruptive" isn't really much of an issue at Woodland Park. We sometimes have to help kids practice keeping their voices down during the indoor portions of our day, and we do have our circle times which can be disrupted by a loud or unruly kid, but since we're a cooperative there is never a lack of laps on which these kids can sit, which, in almost every case, is the best way to sooth a child, and is never a bad thing no matter what the underlying cause.

The rest of our days are designed around the children creating their own learning, moving how they choose, where they choose, when they choose, engaging for as long or as short as they want. Kids can go deep, they can go broad; they can do it loudly or softly; they can do it alone or in a big group. The only time behavior is an issue is when it comes to hurting or frightening themselves or others.

Not long ago, we had a boy in class who had been previously working with an OT on what was being called SPD. One of the ways in which it manifested was that he had the impulse to roughly and frequently engage his classmates, often by biting, tackling, pinching, twisting their fingers or otherwise hurting them. Making matters worse, he was physically bigger than most of his classmates. He had already become quite adept at saying, "I'm sorry," although it seemed that it was without meaning to him, almost as if he were saying it as a social nicety like "please," "thank you," or "you're welcome." It seemed to me like what we were witnessing were misguided attempts at friendship, at connection, especially since the kids to whom he seemed most attracted where most often the "victims."

Of course, it wasn't long before his classmates began to notice his patterns, sometimes talking of him as a "bad kid." I remember one such discussion around our snack table in which a group of four boys argued about whether or not he hurt other people on purpose: "He hurts me!" "Well, he never hurts me!" "He's a bad guy!" "No, he's not!" That kind of thing. The most distressing point came one day when we were playing with a tent outdoors. A large group of kids had declared it their fort and were making forays into the wider space to "hunt." At one point, the adults were shocked to realize that they were hunting this poor boy. Thankfully, he was oblivious, thinking he was just part of a fun running game: in fact, I'm pretty sure he thought he was the leader because everywhere he went, the other kids were running after him.

We weren't going to stay so lucky forever. The adults in our community, prompted both by conversations they'd had at home with their own children, and by what they had seen with their own eyes, were understandably concerned, both about everyone's physical safety, but also about the stigmatization of this boy, who clearly wasn't fully capable of controlling his behavior. There were several meetings at which this was discussed. His parents shared extensively and honestly about what they knew and didn't know, offering tips and techniques that they had found effective.

One of my points of confidence/arrogance, is that I'm convinced that given enough time and space, I can get any kid on my bandwagon, and this boy, while a unique challenge, was no different. That was not my concern. I was also not concerned about the parents of this boy, who were as engaged, involved and pro-active as any family I've ever known. I was more worried about the rest of our community: both kids and adults.

What happened next, I think, was one of the most powerful things I've ever seen happen in our school. The parents, as a unified body, with the help of our parent educator, rose up to embrace this boy. There was no talk of removing him or drugging him or any of the other "solutions" that come up in other institutional settings. Instead, parents had conversations at home with their kids, helping them strategize ways that they could constructively stand up for themselves; how this boy sometimes didn't understand that he was hurting people, that we couldn't assume he knew what we were feeling unless we told him. Many families organized playdates outside of school, one-on-one opportunities to create different kinds of bonds than those forged in school. We came up with a community plan of action, one to which we all signed on, and implemented on a day-to-day basis in school.

And you know what? Things started getting better. Yes, he still sometimes hurt his friends, but instead of squealing or crying as they had before, his classmates started saying, forcefully, "Hey, I don't like that! You're hurting me!" When he then said, "I'm sorry," it no longer sounded like an attempt to easily erase a mistake, but rather as if he really felt it. One day he asked a boy who he had often hurt in the past, "Can I sit here?" and his classmate answered, "Sure, if you don't hurt me," to which he replied quite happily, "I won't!" and he didn't. After missing several days of class due to illness, he found himself in the center of a spontaneous group hug upon his return, something that simply could not have happened earlier in the year, both because the other kids were afraid of him and because it would have likely over-stimulated him.

I won't exaggerate: there were several tense months in there, and lots of ebb and flow. He would still get wound up at times, but most of the kids either figured out to just steer clear or, amazingly, join him, jumping or "banging" or shouting along with him. He continued to have "bad days," but we were no longer over-reacting, making things worse, calmly dealing with the situation, and slowly those days became fewer until they really were rather rare. The OTs and others who were working with his family would occasionally attend class to observe him: they rarely saw much to concern them.

Teachers, schools, children, and families don't have the time to wait for the clinical community to decide whether or not something can be diagnosed, an aspect of which being that there is some sort of treatment protocol. This boy's family provided us with reading material they had found useful, and I did quite a bit of reading on my own, much of which to little avail, other than to make me feel that helping him was beyond our little cooperative school's capabilities. I finally, settled on a metaphor that worked for me: it was like he was a helium filled balloon that sometimes became untethered and felt as if he were floating away, a sensation that must feel both exhilarating and frightening. Our job was to help anchor him back to earth and to understand that there was a part of him that didn't want to be brought back down.

As emotionally hard as it was at times, looking back I realize that this was our school's real project for the year. I am so grateful that we are a cooperative, that we are a true community of families, that it didn't matter what his diagnosis, or even if there was a diagnosis, but rather that we found our course of treatment. We acted like a community. It was as simple and as challenging as all that.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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A Not Knocking Down Building

Among the earliest games parents play with their children is some version of "build it up and knock it down." It's a fantastic, developmentally appropriate activity, one that becomes challenging when a roomful of the game's devotes come together in a two-year-old classroom. You see, while most of them enjoy the whole knocking down business, many are not prepared for, nor happy about, their own constructions being decimated by outside forces. This is why we spend a lot of time during these first few months of school negotiating and explaining the concept of "knocking down buildings" versus "not knocking down buildings."

By this point in the school year, most of the children have caught on to the idea, understanding, and usually even remembering, that one must confirm the knock down-ability of any given structure before launching into it. Of course, this is more easily remembered with some types of blocks than others. Usually, for instance, especially as they get older, the kids tend to be more circumspect when approaching something made from wooden blocks, while our light-weight cardboard blocks don't lend themselves to as much intuitive caution. Probably the most challenging blocks is our set of large, spongy blocks (the kind that look like 3D gym mats covered in vinyl), which is also why I consider them to be the most "dangerous" of our blocks: both children and adults, I think, see their "padded" nature, are fooled into assuming "safety," and begin hurling their bodies into and onto them without precautions being taken as to what or who might be in, under, or behind them.

Another of our "block" sets that are perennially tempting knock-down targets, even for our oldest children, are the re-purposed diaper wipe boxes a former teacher collected through the baby days of her two sons. Not only are they lightweight, but because they must be more or less balanced atop one another to create a structure of any size, anything constructed from them is always on the verge of coming down.

Last week, I wrote about the rowdiness of wrestling. Well, when the same children built with these blocks, in the same space, only a few days removed from the wrestling, we saw an exercise in the opposite style of large motor play. The first children on the scene, two girls and two boys, used the entire set to create a delicate "house" for themselves, barely large enough for their four bodies. Ostensibly, the game they played together was one of housekeeping that evolved into shopkeeping, but the real game was about maintaining their building. Every movement, every jostle, every lurch, threatened their carefully constructed home, and every movement, jostle and lurch required corrective measures, as well as more discussion.

The game was one of constant conversation, the four of them creating their game together sentence by sentence, question by question, negotiation by negotiation, idea by idea. They were so engrossed in their game, that they didn't notice when a pair of boys, coming across their temporarily empty building started toward it with their gleeful intent obvious. I role modeled what I want the children to learn to do, stepping toward the boys mid-assault, and saying loudly and firmly, "Stop! That's not a knocking down building!"

The boys stopped in their tracks and I stepped back to allow the building owners, now alerted, to take over.

"Yeah, that's our house!" "Don't knock it down!" and "We're still using it!" I imagine it must have felt a little like arriving home after work with that last piece of cake in mind, only to find that someone has eaten it. The two boys, these boys who on other days wrestle with abandon, stood, considering their next move.

One of them looked to me in complaint, "They're using all the blocks."

I answered, "They are. You can talk to them about that."

He watched them for a moment and apparently thought better of demanding blocks of his own and instead asked, "Can I play too?"

This is a tricky question in preschool. It's often answered with, "No." I usually coach kids to simply say, "I'm playing with you," ask, "What are you playing?," or, best, to just join in, but in this case our cooperative shopkeepers said, "Sure." It was a delight to watch how six children managed their tiny, delicate space, stepping carefully, slowly bending and twisting their bodies to accommodate one another, finding room for one more, repairing damage, and always talking, talking, talking, weaving together their game, their story with language full of drama, storytelling, engineering, commerce, careful, controlled large body movement, and agreements. 

And through it all, this fragile building remained standing, until finally, in the end, by mutual consent, it had it's date with destiny.

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If We Really Care About Children And Families

Maybe it's because I just returned from Iceland where we got to study what I consider to be excellent examples of early childhood education, but it seems like every time I turn around I'm seeing more evidence that the Scandinavian nations are doing things right when it comes to children, families, and democracy.

Anyone who's not been living under a rock is aware of the Finnish educational system, the nation that leads the world academically while focusing on equity rather than academics; minimizes standardized testing; waits until children are the developmentally appropriate age of seven to begin formal literacy education; trusts and supports professional teachers; provides, regular ample recess and minimal homework; and focuses on cooperation over competition. Finland is the media darling, of course, because of their ability to do well on international standardized tests (a measure of success the Finns themselves seem to care little about), but education, and especially early childhood education is highly regarded right across the Scandinavian world.

But it's not just education. It's clear that children and families are a genuinely high priority in these nations. Sweden, for instance, is moving toward a 30 hour work week throughout much of it's economy, with only one percent of it's workforce working more than 50 hour weeks. Not only that but every worker gets 25 annual vacation days, and parents get 480 days of paid maternity/paternity leave. Not only does this mean that families get more time together, but the Swedes have found that workers are happier, healthier, and are more productive with the shortened work week.

I can hear my naysaying neo-liberal friends grumbling about "business climate this" and "economic collapse that," but the truth is that the Scandinavian economies are stable and thriving. Take Denmark, for instance, as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman recently did:

Denmark maintains a welfare state -- a set of government programs designed to provide economic security -- that is beyond the wildest dreams of American liberals. Denmark provides universal health care; college education for free, and students receive a stipend; day care is heavily subsidized. Overall, working-age families receive more than three times as much aid, as a share of GDP, as their US counterparts.

And yes, taxes are high, but the disaster American economic conservatives would predict, just doesn't appear in the offing:

On the contrary, it's a prosperous nation that does quite well on job creation. In fact, adults in their prime working years are substantially more likely to be employed in Denmark than they are in America. Labor productivity in Denmark is roughly the same as it is here, although GDP per capita is lower, mainly because the Danes take a lot more vacation . . . Nor are the Danes melancholy: Denmark ranks at or near the top on international comparisons of "life satisfaction."

I put a lot of stock in those "life satisfaction" rankings because, after all, shouldn't that be the goal of any human institution, including the economy: to serve the people rather than the other way around?

Our nation claims to value children and families, but Scandinavian nations are much more inclined to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to policies that actually demonstrate it. I would even consider Iceland's response to the economic crisis of 2007, in which they let the banks fail, nationalized them, and put criminal bankers in jail, to be evidence of a focus on what's best for average people. Today, their economy is booming, one that everyone shares in, including children and families, as opposed to here in the US where almost all the economic growth goes to the top one percent while the big banks have grown even bigger and the criminal bankers got off without even a slap on the wrist. These are the actions of a people who have their priorities straight.

If we really care about children and families, it's time we took a longer look at what the Scandinavian nations are doing right.

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Many Hands

Many hands make light work. ~John Heywood

This how the Woodland Park Cooperative School does Halloween, probably the highest of our high holidays, the others, in calendrical order being MLK Day, Chinese New Year, and Valentine's Day.

We spent the two weeks leading up to the big night discussing our costumes and making decorations. Then we all dressed up in those costumes, gathered at the school in the evening with tons of food, including too many sweets, and when I say "we all," I mean our entire community that grows to 100 or more children when one includes older siblings and alumni, and at least as many adults. It's an event that seems to grow bigger each year. The center of the festivities take place in what we call the Cloud Room, the Fremont Baptist Church's social hall, a room with a stage and one whole wall lined with mirrors. I set up the classroom simply, with crayons, play dough, what we call "the crazy floor" (large foam blocks interspersed randomly under gym mats), and corn starch packing pellets in the sensory table. The new kindergarten room was open as was the outdoor classroom.

This year, Elijah's mom Unique put together a Halloween themed photo "booth," with small straw bales and a spooky back drop. Elizabeth's mom Susan organized a silent auction that has become an important fundraiser for our school: local businesses, sports teams, and other organizations donate nice items, but the highlights are the handmade, personal and one-of-a-kind experiences that can only come from our community. Devrim's mom Funda set up a jack-o-lantern vomiting guacamole. Every family contributed something.

Grandmas, grandpas and close family friends joined us. More rarely seen spouses turned up, most in costume. And I must say that this is one of the coolest aspects of our annual party: there's a lot of peer pressure to get the adults to at least make a gesture toward a costume. The kids definitely appreciate this and it raises the importance of this night for them when even daddy/mommy who never dresses up is in costume. 

What do we do? We arrive, talk about our costumes, eat food, trash the classroom, take a lot of pictures, get a little overwhelmed, calm down outside, plunge back in, sneak an extra cupcake, and generally be carried away by the night. And we go home exhausted. At least that's how I experience it. In the coming days, children will tell me, conspiratorially, "I had four sweets," or earnestly, "It was too loud," or eagerly, "Let's do it again." We will spend this week rehashing the event, talking about the moments we were excited or frightened or sad or angry. We will discuss what the "big kids" did or what the "little kids" did and begin to plan our costumes for next year.

The highlight for me, the moment I live for, my absolutely most shining moment, is when I get to lead circle time for our entire community. This year, I wore my pink bunny costume, a beautifully sewn thing, with gray "fir" around the cuffs and around the paisley ears. I'm very fond of that costume, but it's damned hot in the best of times, a feature that is compounded by being in a tightly packed room. I sit on the stage and call the children together. I can't describe how magnificent it is to look into the faces of these children I know and, raising my gaze to look just beyond them, the faces of the families who make up who we are.

We sang "Jump Jim Skeleton" and "Roll That Pumpkin Down to Town," and "Itsy Bitsy Spider." We did a few of our anthemic felt board songs and chants, altered to honor the holiday. We sang "If You're Happy and You Know It" using the jack-o-lanterns we've carved in recent days to represent "happy," "sad," "angry," "surprised," "silly," and "pirate," as props. I love nothing more than catching the eyes of alumni students who are now first or second graders, singing lustily along.

I am, by this time, every year, in a full-on sweat, red of the face and wishing I were wearing the more lightweight "sexy" version of whatever costume I'm wearing. Jack and Henry's mom Katie brought me a glass of water. My voice is still feeling it. We may have to rent a sound system for next year -- it's hard projecting over the hubbub of a party.

After this year's "show," I wandered into the classroom. Holy cow. The place was, as previously mentioned, trashed. Now understand, we've been holding this event for quite some time now, and I thought I was prepared, but the state of the classroom was really something. This was going to take hours to set back in order.

I started by picking up one thing and put it back where it belonged. Then another. Soon, without anything being said, one of the fathers joined me, scooping corn starch pellets from the floor back into the sensory table. In another corner of the room another parent began to put away the play dough. Another parent started tidying up the art table. Grandparents and friends pitched in. Before 5 minutes had passed, a dozen adults and at least as many kids were, again without comment or instruction, putting things away, sweeping, organizing. Those hours of work were compressed into 10 minutes through the power of many hands.

When I walked back into the Cloud Room, a similar thing had happened in there: the decorations were down, the tables and chairs were stashed away, the floor was swept, the garbage bags carried to the dumpster. Same with the kitchen where we held the silent auction and the kindergarten room. Even the outdoor classroom was re-set and ready for the following day.

I was the last to leave. As stood in our empty space, lights off, it was hard to believe that the evening had happened, that only moments before we had been laughing, feasting, posing, sweating, singing, and dancing together, all of us, celebrating the magic of many hands. And, as I stood there, dressed in street clothes for my bus ride home, I realized that this is what we celebrate every day at our little cooperative preschool.

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