Diapers, Pee, And Bloody Poop

Yesterday at school we cut open several disposable diapers to see what was inside of them. We found them lined with a thin, white material that we thought looked like cotton.

We then decided to add "pee," in the form of several gallon buckets of water, to see what would happen. They swelled into an impossibly large, gelatinous mass. They sucked up pretty much as much pee as we wanted to add. And we wanted to add a lot.

When it didn't look enough like real pee, we added yellow paint and mixed it in.

Then we decided to find out what would happen if we added "poop," which we did in the form of a couple fists full of clay.

As we played with diapers, pee, and poop, someone found a red paint cake that had been left in a bucket, soggy from the rain the night before. So we added that, making "bloody poop."

We played with our diapers, pee, and bloody poop for quite some time, scooping it into buckets, transferring from one side of the sensory table to the other, telling each other about how it felt and how we'd made it, and what kinds of jokes we could play on the kids doing something else at the top of the hill who would, naturally, believe that we were really playing with diapers, pee, and bloody poop. We then made diaper, pee, and bloody poop soup by seasoning it with wood chips.

Later yesterday evening, when someone asked these children what they did at school, they answered that they'd played with diapers, pee, and bloody poop, instead of shrugging and saying, "I don't know." Then they shared in detail how such a thing came about, while kids who attend other schools would have completely forgotten those worksheets they'd had to fill out. Their older brothers and sisters complained that they never get to do anything fun at school. And weeks and months and perhaps years in the future, they'll say to each other, "Remember that time we played with diapers, pee, and bloody poop?"

We are, quite possibly, the first and only children in the world who have played with diapers, pee, and bloody poop, who know how to do such a thing, who know about it with our eyes, ears, and hands, who know it well enough to teach others. We know things no one else knows, and later, when we're developmentally ready, and we learn to read and write and cipher like almost everyone does whether or not their nose was put to that grindstone in preschool, we'll still also know about diapers, pee, and bloody poop: we'll know what genuine learning is all about.

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