Mouse Trap

One of the lessons I've learned about our still-new outdoor classroom is the importance of regularly refreshing the space. I'm not necessarily talking about tidying up, although that's a part of it, but rather about constantly rotating "old equipment" out of the space and "new equipment" in. I think this is a fundamental difference between the traditional playground with all it's permanently installed swing sets, climbers and slides, and an outdoor classroom.

For instance, I'm very happy that we manufactured our water walls on moveable frames. As fun as they were, they ran their course after a few weeks and are now relegated to storage until they can be new again. The same goes for such things as the cookie tree, the bottle bush, the forest house, and so many other installations, all of which were popular playthings for awhile, but became exhausted, and in a limited space like ours, you've got to pay the freight or you're just in the way. The sound garden has been dismantled entirely, its parts repurposed elsewhere, awaiting a time when we get around to building a new one, as has the elaborate system of pulleys we once had strung up all around and over the beach hut and sand pit.

At the same time, each of these items leave vestigial reminders of themselves, both physically and in the minds of the children, waiting like smolder embers to re-ignite into full-fledged play. For instance, the forest house left behind a pile of cedar branches that the children have, for the last week been using for their own constructions. The sound garden left behind several pot lids and the thunder drum, which still get banged and clattered like echoes of what once was, just biding their time until they are once again part of a symphony.

Thunder drum

I was beginning to believe that our mud pie kitchen had already run its course given that the pots, pans, plates and utensils were already being repurposed for all kinds of things (which is fine) other than as kitchen implements. I'm still probably going to dismantle the stove and oven parts before next week, but we did get a nice pot of "gumbo" out of it yesterday.

And as some fires are cooling, others seem to be heating up. 

Left over from our pulley play is this small bit of the once much larger system:

It still gets a tug or two almost every day, especially by the new and younger students.

But yesterday, those embers re-ignited in a way that tells me it might be time to toss a little more fuel on the fire.

If you can't tell, it's a trap that involves lowering the cage onto its victim. Orlando took the lead in creating it, but at one point it had drawn in at least half the kids, who took turns placing items under the trap, activating the trap, rescuing things from the trap, and generally fiddling with it to make it function better.

It reminds me a little of the final stage of the trap one builds while playing the classic board game Mouse Trap.

I had other plans for today, but to them I'm definitely going to add more ropes and pulleys.

Bonus Spider and Fly Story

And speaking of traps, I wanted to mention an amazing little incident we experienced yesterday involving another spider. This time it was a large orb spider in the garden sitting in the middle of a perfect web.

In fact, we arrived yesterday to find a dozen of them in and around our garden, which means perhaps we finally have some predators out there to help us with our pest control efforts. There were also a lot of flies buzzing about. 

At one point I managed to snatch a fly from a leaf. (I know, impressive right?) I really don't know what possessed me, but I tossed it toward the spider's web and as luck would have it, the fly actually hit the spider right in the abdomen. Oh man, I've seen things like this on nature shows, but never in real life. The spider reacted instantly, getting the fly wrapped before we even knew what was happening. It was vicious and efficient. Fortunately, there were several kids around to witness this nature show as the spider worked furiously, then stopped, I suppose, to paralyze the poor thing with its venom. It must have been hungry because it then proceeded to devour the fly as we watched.

The kids wanted me to catch more flies, which I was unable to do. They did not want me to catch a butterfly.

15 Capabilities

I'm a critic of the Obama administration's "Race To The Top" education initiative, but one part of the plan I support is the call for universal public preschool. The devil, however, is in the details, and I fear that our political and business leaders will once again consult only amongst themselves and mandate early childhood education programs that yet again emphasize the "test, punish, and privatize approach" that has come to characterize the rest of their education proposals, without even considering the kind play-based models that are supported both through the research, as well as our own anecdotal experiences as teachers and parents.

And when they do "test" preschoolers, what will they be looking for? Probably, what could be called "academic kindergarten readiness," which is really only a very minor part of what children need to learn in preschool in order to be successful. In fact, most of the research indicates that non-cognitive skills like motivation, sociability, the ability to work with others are far more important indicators of future success than are the so-called "academic ones."

But the politicians and business people will ask, What about accountability? How will we assess these non-quantifiable things? 

Pamela over at Leaves & Branches, Trunk & Roots has just posted the full text of a document developed by North Seattle Community College instructor Tom Drummond (one of my own ECE teachers), as part of a National Association for Early Childhood Teacher Education work group.

I'm going to post it as well. What do you think?

15 Capabilities: Outcomes for Early Eduction

Here is a way to describe more important qualities in children than "academic readiness" or the ability to pass a knowledge test for entry into elementary school.
When children leave early childhood to enter common school they can . . .

Participate as a member of an interdependent community.

Care for themselves, the others and the community.

Treat other with love and compassion.

Cooperate with other children to accomplish group goals.

Celebrate group accomplishments.

Laugh and play with a tangible sense of joy.

Express many human emotions in language and art.

Be inquisitive.

Initiate new ideas and invent solutions to problems.

Stick at difficult tasks or come back to them later in order to succeed.

Run, hit, catch, throw, kick and tumble.

Sing and dance with exuberance.

Paint, draw, sculpt, and construct objects of beauty.

Maintain the community's spaces in cleanliness and order.

Greet guests with courtesy and charm.

These are all natural acquistions for children from all cultures when they are (1) treated as capable human beings, (2) listened to and (3) trusted. Provisions for young children that offer the opportunity to be with other children can create the kind of community in which all children achieve these 15 Capabilities. Imagine all children by age 6 being this way.

Then imagine being a Kindergarten teacher and having children with these 15 capabilities enter the room at the beginning of the year. There would be no "behavior problems." These children would be responsive and eager to learn. The teacher could get right to work, listening to the children's interests and finding out what aspect of the world they wanted to explore. If that topic were spiders, for example, children would be eager to examine, write about, read about, draw, create poetry, music, scientific displays, research, count, mathematically represent spiders. Because they shared that love of learning with others, they would exceed all the academic standards by far. Experience in a culture of a learning community is true "readiness" for school, because all children come to view themselves as capable and competent, not just a few.

The 15 Capabilities are durable. Next year the 1st grade teacher would inherit those same children, eager and happy to be at school, not like the browbeaten, destroyed children we often see in schools today.

It is up to every one of us who considers himself or herself a contributor to the early experience of our children -- as an elementary or early childhood, teacher or principal or parent -- to examine what we really want for our children and advocate for it with politicians, leaders, and our friends. The 15 Capabilities are what we want for all children.

Right now the dominant discourse is about remediation for some of our children, the poor ones, the underprivileged ones, the ones that are "at risk." When community leaders and politicians want children to be "ready" for school they are speaking about poor children. Rather than offering resources, they are offering tests and standards. The implication in the dominant discourse is that certain children are deficit and need remediation.

Actually, these children and their families need good places to be and grow with adequate resources and staff who earn a family support wage, so all our children are not destroyed by the cultures of poverty and racism. All our children can achieve the 15 Capabilities that can transform our society, reduce poverty, and make our towns and cities better places to live.

Two actions we can take right now can help.

1. Never accept talk about the problems of education as residing in the children or their families. The children are who they are, capable and strong from the time of their birth. Every here and now offers possibilities for new ways of being. That's what we do in school. That's our job as early educators of children and families.

2. Talk about the 15 Capabilities rather than academic readiness as the outcome we all desire for our children and childhood.

The Urge To Destroy: The Urge To Create

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.  -Mikhail Bakunin

I must have been about 4-years-old. I was in my jammies, ready for bed. As I headed to the toilet, I impulsively picked up a red crayon and proceeded to draw a long, dark red line on the hallway wall between my room and the bathroom. I did the same thing on the way back. It was entirely out of character for me. My mother was so surprised that she didn't even reprimand me. I have few concrete memories from those early years, but that is one of them.

I don't plan my television watching, but when I hunt for programming, Mythbusters trumps everything else, even if it's a repeat. I like that it's a science program from which I always learn something. I covet their workshop far more than any mansion. I enjoy being able to correct people in social circumstances when they trot out an urban legend that the team has dispelled. And, yes, it satisfies my curiosity about such things as what would happen to a compact car if it should come between two speeding semi-trucks when they have a head-on collision.

One of the things that first attracted me to the young upstart late night comedian David Letterman was his regular feature, "Dropping Stuff Off A Five Story Building," wherein he would, well, drop stuff off a 5 story building. So influential was this recurring "skit," that I've turned it into an annual Pre-K science experiment that I call "Break or Bounce?" in honor of the more mundane classic preschool predicting experiment, "Sink or Float?" I gather together a random assortment of items like a frying pan, a glass jar, a watermelon (or pumpkin if it's around Halloween), a piece of chalk, a can of beans, a candle, a super ball, a 5 lb. sack of flour, and whatever other items come to hand, then one by one carry them to the top a ladder, call for the predictions, "Break or bounce?" then let gravity do its thing. Just like the Mythbusters, just like the Letterman audience, we spontaneously laugh and cheer with each impact, whatever the result.

When international television superstar Jenny posted about her kids' giant tile mosaic, it reminded me that I had a couple boxes of dirty, white bathroom tile tucked away in the storage room. Ours was a four step art project combining the urge to destroy with the urge to create, with lots of useful fine and large motor skill practice thrown in for good measure.

Step one: we used squirt bottles of soapy water and rags to wash the tiles.

Step two: We carefully wrapped our tile in a rag.

Step three: We placed our bundle on the floor and whacked it several times with a rubber mallet.

Step four: we glued our broken pieces to the community collage.

Not every child went through every step, but that's the beauty of this project for a 2-6 year-old class. There was a place for everyone, with whatever interest or skill, to step in creatively. And yes, there did tend to be a division of labor based on gender, with the girls more interested in the tile cleaning and gluing, while the boys tended to go for the wrapping and smashing, although this was by no means a hard and fast rule. (I'm tempted here to go into a discussion about how males in Western society have historically derived their power from the ability to take life, while females derive their power from creating it, but in a modern world in which the day-to-day need for life-taking things like hunting and making war have outlived their usefulness, I'm lead inevitably to the organizing question of every society to ever exist: "What do we do with the men?" which is a subject far too broad to fit within the borders of a little preschool blog post.)

The final piece is very heavy and very beautiful. I hope the white glue holds it together.

White Glue Vs. Hot Glue Guns: A Story Of Night And Day

I've always been a white school glue kind of teacher, my classes going through gallons of it each year, but I've had a come to Jesus kind of experience these past few months when it comes to its limitations, and through that an epiphany about the capabilities of the children.

On Tuesday morning, it dawned on me that we really hadn't done much with glue during the summer session, so I broke out a stack of corrugated cardboard and cut it into various shapes and sizes for collage making. We've done this kind of monochrome project many times over the years -- there tends to be a lot of talk about shapes, sizes, recycling, and the use of glue. The finished pieces are usually landscapes of texture and angular shadow. Not bad for a preschool art project.

There are always a few kids who get the idea of going 3-D, but because of the slow-drying nature of the glue and the jostling about typical of a classroom full of kids, the structures almost always wind up getting pancaked. As I sat watching Ava struggle with her efforts, I almost couldn't watch, knowing that no matter how hard she tried, no matter how long she persevered, her structure's 2-D destiny was assured.

I was right, of course, and as her house of cards tumbled down before her eyes, having added one bit too many, she finally walked away, philosophical it seemed, but with her artistic vision unrealized.

There was a steady trickle of kids engaged at the art table throughout the morning, but it didn't surprise me to pass by later in the morning to find our Northwest wildlife identification chart on the table, evidence that some level of boredom or frustration had come to call. (Not that I have anything against identifying native animals, but come on, we're an urban school with a tiny outdoor space filled with kids. The only thing we have to identify are crows.)

The 3-Dish piece in the background here was mine.

White glue has its place, but as I left to walk the dogs on Tuesday, I was thinking about Ava and the limitations imposed by this languid, non-toxic, washable, 24-hours-to-cure medium.

That's right, if you've been reading here for the past few months, you know that hot glue guns were on my mind.

So on Thursday, when Sadie and Venezia's mom Medora took her place at the work bench as the parent-teacher in charge of the station, she found a stack of cardboard and 3 hot glue guns. In fairness to the white glue collage efforts from earlier in the week, I also added various cutting tools and a box of theatrical lighting gel scraps, and moved it outdoors, but essentially it was the same project just using a different adhesive. Thinking about Ava's frustrated efforts, my only instruction was, "They can make whatever they want, but maybe they'll want to build a house."

Are you kidding me? It's night and day.

Granted, moving the whole thing outdoors was also part of opening up possibilities for the kids. The expansive opportunity of incorporating wood chips, pine cones, and other "naturally occurring" objects from the environment are evident. (Are we the only preschool on earth for which beer caps and wine corks qualify as naturally occurring objects?) Still, look what the glue guns made possible! They got on a roll, their visions became immediately manifest, their conversations full of "What if . . ." and "Why don't we . . .?" and "Let's . . ."  It was an explosion of creativity and cooperation. And it was that tool, the hot glue gun, that gave them the power to make their ideas real. 

White glue will still be part of our repertoire going forward (I have a great example for tomorrow's post), but I regret all those years I withheld these mighty tools from the children, limiting them, for fear that they might go home with tiny red burns on their thumbs.

Our Spinny Barrel Thingy

It wasn't until I sat down to write this post this morning that I realized we don't even have a name for this apparatus:

It's a large cardboard shipping barrel . . .

. . . which was probably originally used for some kind of dry food product, reinforced on both ends by plywood circles . . .

. . . then run through with a piece of 1" metal pipe that sticks out about 8 inches on each end . . .

. . . in order to fit into the "V's" cut into each end of this sturdy wooden frame, so that it can be rotated by hand.

We then wrap it in art paper and we're ready to go.

I wish I could claim credit for devising and building this art making machine, but that laurel rests on the head of some unknown parent or teacher from Woodland Park's past. It's so sturdily made that I wonder if the mystery manufacturer isn't the same master builder who gave us our spectacular sensory table.

There is something about preschool that inspires this type of one-of-a-kind, do-it-yourself innovation. Everywhere I turn on the internet or around my city of Seattle, I run into preschools using unique contraptions and constructions that simply can't be found anywhere else. I'm sure they're out there, but you don't hear a lot about kindergartens that inspire such things, let alone elementary schools, where nearly all the curriculum supplies can be purchased through catalogs from large manufacturers that supply all the schools all across the country. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that most preschools are independently run operations, while kindergarten is our first year of mass public schooling. I suppose it's part of the misguided, yet relentless drive toward academic standardization on the part of our politicians of all stripes, who seem convinced that we should be running schools like factories, but that's another story (if you click this link, I suggest reading the 4 posts from the bottom up).

I love our special nameless spinny barrel thingy even if it is a large heavy piece of equipment that defies all efforts to be easily stored or even described. For one thing, it's a toy that encourages cooperative play. A single child can spin it which is often enough for the 2-year-olds, but if you're going to make art with it, you need at least one friend to help you.

We most often use it with markers, although it can be used with paint brushes, cars dipped in paint, paint rollers, or just about anything else that can deliver color to paper. Often older children will take turns spinning the barrel for their friends, but it draws a bigger crowd when an adult takes on the spinning job. Then we get to work on concepts like creating cooperative art, negotiating self-space, or just playing together.

We go faster!

We go slower.

We reverse directions.

We might lie on our backs underneath the barrel for a new perspective, or admire a friend's technique.

And when we're done, we put our caps back on our markers (most of the time) before moving on to something else.