We'll Just Have To Do It Again

A while back Sherry and Donna over at Irresistible Ideas For Play Based Learning posted about the miniature wooden house blocks they made from scraps of wood.

I found out about it from Jenny at Let The Children Play who took the idea, but added her own twist by letting the kids do (most) of the painting themselves.

I figured it was Woodland Park's turn to evolve our own version of the concept this week.

As you can see, I didn't wait to find or cut the wedge shapes that my Australian "sisters" used (what are they building down there anyway to come up with those specific scrap shapes?). Instead I pulled out one of our many boxes of (American?) rectangular scraps of plywood, a box of wooden bits and pieces, and a box of picture frame corners.

Every preschool should have a good relationship with local framing shops. Not only will they usually give you their scrap mat board, which is great for collage projects, but they periodically have to throw out their wall of frame samples to make room for the new models. These even have spots of velcro on the back so that they hold their position when placed on the rug.

We've had a sort of free-form painting station set up adjacent to our block area all week (where we are also adding to our mushroom collection) and the kids were encouraged to paint the "new blocks" any way they want. As you might guess, we have many, many more painted blocks by now than I'm showing in this picture.

After Jenny's blocks were finished, she then reported that "Pretty much anything that didn't move was painted." Now we were doing our painting indoors and while I strive to keep up with Jenny in her efforts to keep things child-centered, I couldn't just turn them loose on the classroom, so we took the paint cups outdoors.

Before long I spotted a gang of kids at the far end of the playground, gathered around the "horse stable" we built yesterday.

I've learned to not be surprised when Dennis' dad Terry

is in the middle of this kind of action.

First they had augmented the stable structurally, then took the concept of painting their own blocks (just as I had from Jenny and she had from Sherry and Donna) and were applying it in their own way:

Finn V. wanted to make sure I got pictures of his

number 10's

Then they took the idea a step beyond, painting "pretty much anything that didn't move."

If you can't tell from the photo, we now have "glitter" stairs . . .

. . . and a glitter table.

We're just using tempera paint and it rained pretty hard yesterday evening. I suspect we'll just have to do it again!