Fly Swatter Painting!

I think it was my second year teaching at Woodland Park when a group of parents got the idea that they were going to raise the funds to install a new floor in our school. Our floor was indeed worn. It was even held together with duct tape in a few places, but I objected saying that I didn't want to be responsible for taking care of a new floor unless they were planning to install drains so we could just hose the whole thing down at the end of each day. They settled on painting the walls our current butter yellow and forced new area rugs on me by promising that they wouldn't curse me, even in their heads, when we got paint, glue, paper mache paste, goo, muck, mud, blood and boogers on them.

All these years later and our floor is even more worn and held together with even more duct tape. And I still love the freedom of not having to worry about it.

Messy art is one of the hallmarks of our school. I've shared many of our experiences here, including when we painted with rubber mallets and when we mixed our own "mud paint" using dozens of jars of powdered tempera. But yesterday we achieved the summit, the ultimate, and the acme of messy art, all rolled into one. It's an art project that stands beside the balloon cage as signatures of the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool experience. Yesterday was fly swatter painting!

The adult you see in the background is Max's mom Callie who did a masterful

job of managing the project, and I think she still likes me!

The fly swatters are going so fast you can't even see them!

Look at the floor!

The other kids cleared out for this two-fisted motor boat technique that 

ultimately tore right through the paper.

Don't let the photos fool you, it wasn't just boys having the messy fun. This just happened to be when I broke out my phone camera. I mainly started shooting pictures to document the mess. We got paint on the floor below us . . .

. . . we got paint on the door in front of us . . .

. . . we got paint on the cabinets behind us . . .

. . . we got paint on the fabric shelf covers beside us . . . 

. . . we even got paint on the ceiling above us . . .

Naturally, I didn't point any of this out to the kids. I've learned from experience that if you do, they then try to spread the paint around. There's no need to encourage a mess -- the best messes are the ones that just happen when you're too busy playing to notice.

The kids playing Candyland got splattered, our costumes are now speckled, and even Anjali, who normally hates getting messy, went home with purple paint in her hair. There was paint on the windows, but Dennis' dad Terry had it cleaned up before I could get a picture.

In fact, the most amazing part of fly swatter painting was that as I told the children my version of Robert Munsch's story Stephanie's Ponytail, I did so against the background sounds of Callie, Terry, and Charlie B.'s mom Andrea giving the school a good scrub down (although I asked them to leave the paint on the doors, ceiling and easels).

I feel like I'm forgetting something . . . Oh yeah, the art!

Oh no, if you look carefully you'll see that one

of the flies escaped!

And 2 of them got away here.

No survivors.

We ran out of room to dry our masterpieces and finally resorted to just transporting them directly to the recycling bin. And I fear that most of the ones that we did save are going to be hopelessly stuck together, so there won't be a lot to take home. But that's hardly the point of fly swatter painting.