Extra! Extra! Breaking News: Sound Garden, Pre-K Play, City Museum

There are new developments to breathlessly report to you from the front lines of 3 of my 4 posts this month. Here are the headlines:

Sound Garden Sprouting, Threatens To Take Over Outdoor Classroom
That's right, on Monday, Jack's dad Karl worked throughout most of our outdoor session constructing a new addition to the Sound Garden we began planting last week.

He added several tone pipes from a dismantled xylophone . . .

. . . a triangle . . .

. . . a tambourine . . .

. . . two cow bells (you can always use more cow bell) . . .

(Oh, and Donna, notice in the background how we are using

our single playground tire to pathetically imitate you.)

. . . and this cow hide drum from my own childhood.

Naturally, we saved some of our original Sound Garden foliage, grafting on a few extra pot lids.

I like having adults at work on projects in both our construction/tinkering area as well as in our garden. Karl had kids stopping by the check on what he was up to, keeping tabs on his progress. I wasn't on the scene most of the time so I don't know how much input they children had, but it really doesn't matter. Karl's main job was to role-model the kind of creative behavior we're hoping to foster (and, indeed, have started to foster) in this area full of real tools, construction materials, and loose parts, a concept that is still relatively new to our outdoor play. In the actual garden as well as the Sound Garden, I like to get an adult to work on a project like planting, deadheading, or transplanting. Children often pause to observe, ask questions, then finally get their own hands dirty while pitching in.

Josephine's family also contributed a thunder drum for us to include in our Sound Garden.

This, of course, has been wildly popular and not just the source of loud noises. On Monday Finn V. and I made real music (and by "real music" I mean we made sounds together with intent and rhythm). He was beating on the top (bottom) of the drum with a spatula when I arrived on the scene with a ladle and starting beating it on the side. When he imitated me by switching to the side, I switched to the top. We were soon in a brilliant rhythm of bang-bang-bang, switch, bang-bang-bang, switch, bang-bang-bang, switch that went on through at least 3 dozen cycles. We then went into several cycles of bang, switch, bang, switch, bang, switch, before returning to the original pattern. We experienced the intimacy of doing. It was far more remarkable than it sounds. The expression on his face, and probably mine, showed the kind of deep joy and concentration that can only come from connecting like this with the other people. Yes!

Pre-K Play Adds Musical Number To An Already Chock-A-Block Show

The cast and crew of "A Beautiful Nightmare" realized yesterday that we had a problem. At one point our assistant director Sarah (who did not want to be in the play so is instead operating our giant puppets and other props) has the challenging task of a rapid switch-over from this . . .

 

. . . to this . . .

. . . when our antagonist Maleficent "changes from bad to good." She has just put the rest of the cast to sleep and it was just "too long" for preschool aged actors to just lie on stage without moving their bodies while she made the change backstage. We've decided that we will entertain the audience during this time with a type of dance interlude.

I offered the children a selection of dance music to choose from including the B52's Love Shack, Cesaria Evora's Sabine larga'm (African jazz), Quincy Jones' Soul Bossa Nova, the overture to the Nutcracker (every prior Pre-K play cast has chosen this song for their play), and ABBA's Dancing Queen. As I played each of these songs for them, they got up and tried it out by dancing. They really liked Soul Bossa Nova and there was a strong push for the Nutcracker, but in the end we chose Dancing Queen, surly a crowd-pleaser.

Woodland Park Family Risks Life And Limb In Visit To City Museum . . . And Survives!

Charlie L. recently missed a few days of school while his family went away on a trip, I think I even knew they were going to St. Louis, but it was just a random piece of information rattling around in my skull until his mom Shelly read yesterday's post about City Museum. Totally by coincidence, she had posted her own story about their visit there on their family blog on the very same day. Click here and wish you could be Charlie L.

I love this post because the whole family, other than perhaps the baby, are attuned to the elements of danger, but that is obviously part of what makes City Museum so special. I'm officially envious. Now that I know he's been, I can't wait to talk with Charlie today about how he remembers the experience.

"You Take A Risk When You Go Anyplace"

"Remember that time you were really careful and nothing happened?" --Unknown

I'm pretty sure that City Museum in St. Louis is the one of the best man-made places on earth. I'm saying that having never been, and basing my opinion on a few pictures, the recommendation of Charlie L.'s mom Shelly, and the powerful idea behind the place. It is evidence that we are part of mother nature and can create as brilliantly as her other tools like rain and wind and earthquakes.

All photos from the City Museum website

No, really, stop reading. Click on the link and explore that site. Watch the video, take the photo tour, look at the attractions, read the "about" section. 

I'm inspired by what one artist with a clear vision can create. As a boy I know I would want to live in City Museum -- I almost want to live there now. Over 700,000 people visit there annually, twice the population of St. Louis. This is an urban for-profit enterprise designed around honest to goodness play. They earn enough to afford their $600,000 per year insurance premium and also settle, one way or another, the dozens of personal injury law suits they've faced since their opening in 1997, according to this Wall Street Journal article. (And watch the video over there as well. I’m so annoyed that I was actually in St. Louis a few summers ago and no one told me of the existence of this place.)

I sympathize with the people who have been injured at City Museum, just as I do with the children who have been injured at Woodland Park or anywhere else for that matter. Believe me, I would be outraged if my own daughter had lost 2 fingers, although it would mitigate my sue-the-pants-off-the-bastards instinct if I discovered she did so while climbing into a cage containing a metal drum shaped like a pig, that continuously fills with 150 lbs. of water until the weight causes it to tip violently forward, vomiting (the exhibit is called the “Puking Pig”) it into a pool below, then tried to touch it. The fact that the girl attempted this tells me that her education was lacking before she went into the City Museum. I’m sad that it cost her two fingers to learn something that she really should have learned long before arriving at the City Museum, and I’m angry at all the people who “protected” her up to that point.

From the Wall Street Journal article:

“I slipped on the edge and scraped my leg, said Garett Vance, 11, sitting atop what the museum bills as the world’s largest pencil with a museum-provided ice pack taped to his leg. His Mother, Mindy Vance, says a friend warned her that the museum was dangerous but she wasn’t deterred.

“You take a risk when you go anyplace,” says Ms. Vance, a nurse-practitioner who live in Springfield, Ill., about two hours away.

As founder of The Tinkering School and author of Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) Gever Tully says in his fantastic TED presentation, "When we round every corner and eliminate every sharp object, every pokey bit in the world, then the first time that kids come in contact with anything sharp or not made of round plastic they hurt themselves with it."

As I see it, a part of our job as educators, especially those of us working with young children is to provide experiences that are not devoid of “pokey bits.” It’s not that we want children to get hurt, it’s that we know they are going to get hurt – it’s an essential part of their education. Good judgement and common sense can only be learned through experience.

As I’ve written here before:

Bumps and bruises are one of our most powerful learning tools. They are the A-B-C’s and 1-2-3’s of the law of natural consequences. Of course, we try to help children avoid injury, but I’m convinced that every owie we help them avoid is really just an owie we’ve pushed off into the future.

Like that poor girl with the Puking Pig. And this doesn’t go for physical owies, but psychological and emotional ones as well. Owies are facts of existence and avoiding them at all costs is depriving children of the opportunity to learn about them, to learn from them, and to be prepared for the real world in which they live.

The master-mind behind City Museum, Bob Cassilly is now planning an adventure park called Cementland where he says he’s going to “take all the cool things in the world like airplanes and giant machines and mounds of dirt and big industrial buildings and I’m going to make an adventure park where you get to climb on top of buildings and through tunnels and slide down giant hills and do all the things that are normally illegal, I guess.”

I’m so going there.

If you’re interested, here are some of the other things I’ve written on danger and risk-taking:

Dangerous Play
Dangerous Easter
Dangerism
Learning From Bumps And Bruises

The Law Of Natural Consequences

I Wanna Live In A Turquoise House

(Note: Thanks to Lenore over at Free-Range Kids for making me aware of City Museum in the first place.)

I'm Sure Not Going To Touch It

When the only view I give you of our classroom is through the peep hole of this blog, it's easy to make it look like our kids are only being offered free-form, open-ended art opportunities that allow them to explore form, color, texture, shape, and the intrinsic properties of interesting materials and tools.

Sometimes, however, they arrive to find things like this on the art table:

They also found multi-colored beads. The idea was to create "bendy bead people" by applying those beads to the arms and legs. I know, beading is great for developing fine motor skills, but the whole thing is a bit too preprogrammed for my taste. At the same time, I thought these kinds of flexible people would be fun additions to Little World and I was hoping that the kids would be excited about making their own toys to play with in there. 

To get them going, I grabbed a bunch of curly willow branches that Charlie M.'s mom Elizabeth brought in awhile back, stuck them into a pot of old play dough and we started hanging our finished people from them.

As you can probably tell by the lack of beads on most of them, the project really didn't capture their imaginations. I could write it off to the idea that there were just too many other exciting things going on in the classroom, but that doesn't explain why, after the initial fun of hanging them from the branches, the poor things spent the last two weeks in a pile, untouched.

I found a new place for the curly willow branches and set the pot of play dough aside. One day we spotted a huge black crow eating the play dough as we played indoors and we crowded around the window to watch, which was the most excitement we'd gotten out of the project up to that point. 

It rained off and on for a couple days and we forgot all about it, until last week when these 3 discovered the real essence of what it was all about (I'll advise you to not look at the following photos if you're eating):

See? It was a free-form, open-ended art opportunity after all. It's inspiring how children will always seek out genuine experiences over manufactured ones. It will have to stay out there for the rest of the school year because I'm sure not going to touch it.

Oh yeah, and the other thing I learned from this, while gathering up the curly willow branches from where children had stuck them as "decorations" into various pots around the outdoor classroom, I found this one:

It's growing leaves! I hope we can find a spot for a curly willow because they're incredible trees.

The Sound Garden

After over a week of horsing around with our scientific exploration of pendulums, interest had definitely petered out by close of business on Monday. After class I set about dismantling our remaining PVC pipe painting pendulum . . .

. . . as well as the block tower destroyer . . .

. . . but then started thinking about all the effort I'd put into devising them and the hassle of returning all the parts to where they belong. I prefer to think of it as being economical with my own physical energy, not laziness, that got me thinking about how I could repurpose what we already had for the rest of the week.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled, vaguely, pictures of a certain apparatus that just might serve to allow me to leave for lunch without exerting myself any longer in the classroom. That afternoon I dropped by Goodwill, where I found a large bin full of orphaned lids from pots and pans. On Wednesday morning we carried the pendulum skeletons, some string and the various lids to the outdoor classroom and converted them into the first stage of what I think will evolve into a new Woodland Park outdoor feature: "The Sound Garden." 

As you can imagine, all we needed to add was some old silverware, bamboo, fly swatters, rubber spatulas, and a miscellany of other stick-like objects, and we had ourselves a big, loud time.

I highly recommend the high-pitched resonance of that small, red cast-iron lid.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how the pendulum that I'd built for the purpose of knocking down small blocks had been a flop with the Pre-3 class. The group of boys who had been attracted to it were far more interested in holding onto the horizontal parts, then bouncing it up and down until it broke, than they were the pendulum effects. That same group of boys on Friday, "sticks" in hand, were the ones who had the most fun in the Sound Garden, creating a big time cacophony without breaking anything but the peace.

Our classroom is an acoustically challenged place, which has lead to my being judicious in making musical and other sound producing implements available indoors. I'm kind of shocked that I'm only just now realizing that, duh, one of the advantages of being an urban preschool is that we can make all the noise we want outside, and our neighbors probably won't even hear it, let alone complain.

And for those of you who are interested, I'm borrowing the name Sound Garden from the Dave Hollis sculpture "A Sound Garden" that resides on grounds of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facility here in Seattle (which is where the band Soundgarden got its name as well).  Hollis' piece is designed to take advantage of the winds along Lake Washington to produce a variety of eerie, dissonate sounds.

Courtesy of NOAA

http://www.flickr.com/photos/slightlynorth/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Pre-K Play: "A Beautiful Nightmare"

This is the title the Pre-K kids have selected for their play, which they've been working on since January. We went through an elaborate process of nominating ideas, then voting on them. In years past, classes have generally elected to entitle their production by combining all of the nominations in one long string, in a bid to make everyone happy. This year's class chose A Beautiful Nightmare, Sarah's suggestion. We wound up using a process of elimination voting style, in which the nominations with zero votes were  tossed out as we continued to vote for the ones that received at least one vote in the prior round. It was interesting to watch opinions and allegiances shift as we went through this process of out-in-the-open voting. After watching this, I'm not entirely sure I'm still a fan of the secret ballot.

This group made an artistic decision rather than a social one. I'm really quite blown away by that. When left to their own devices, I've found that if you eliminate the possibility of might making right, children tend to make group decisions by trying to please everyone. For instance, when the topic is what color to paint something, it usually winds up being "rainbow." This decision was not like that. They listened to each other plead their cases. One by one the children quit voting for just their own ideas and decided, in the interest of all of us, to chose the second best idea. Favorites were argued for and once we were down to the finalists I believe the children made a provocative artistic decision instead of a cop-out feel good one. Yes!

This Pre-K class has kept me on my heels all year with their hive-mindedness. At one point nearly the entire cast of the play were Lilac Fairies, the boys included. Who's ever heard of that? Seriously. As a teacher-coach I can't help but feel quite proud of my team this season.

I haven't posted a play update for some time (previous posts in order of appearance are here, here, here, here, and here). This is where we stand with 4 rehearsals to go.

A Beautiful Nightmare

A merry-go-round with horses on it.

Assistant Director Sarah, who did not want to be in the play will 

walk up on stage and spin this altered sit-n-spin.

Then we need some buildings, garages, house, and some vehicles, like a car.

This will be our back drop. Sarah's mom Lisa outlined the buildings after

the kids made the ill-advised decision to paint blue buildings against a

blue sky. Group painting is a very challenging thing. I'm proud of the 

children for this artwork that we worked on over the course of 3 weeks.

A Black Kitty (Anjali) waddles in. 

A real Unicorn Pegasus. (Annabelle)

A Pink & Purple Striped Superhero. (Ella)

A Pink & Purple Superhero Josephine.

Then a Car (Marcus), a Forklift (Thomas), and the Tooth Fairy (Jack) come up.

Then the Bunny (Luna) comes.

Then the Pink & Purple Superhero Katherine comes.

Then the Train (Finn P.) comes and all the Superheros, the Tooth Fairy, the Car, The Bunny, The Black Kitty, and the Forklift go on the Train and they all go around the audience.

Then all the characters scare away Maleficent.

We've glue gunned this onto a bicycle helmet which Sarah, in 

her role as assistant director, will wear. We have made arms

for Maleficent from PVC pipe, scarves, and ski gloves. To

make things clear, this is not a costume, it's a puppet being

operated by our assistant director who did not want to be in

the play.

All the characters come and put fairy dust on the audience to wake them up. (Gold glitter.)

Then all the characters except the Unicorn Pegasus and the Bunny get in a battle. The Bunny stops the battle with magic.

And then the characters come and sprinkle fairy dust (more gold glitter) onto the White Pegasus. Then the Unicorn Pegasus flies away. Then all the other characters go around the audience.

Then the really, really big rainbow nutcracker comes.

This photo really doesn't do it justice,

and we haven't worked on the face,

hands and feet yet, but it's taking 

shape according to our plan.

Then so the nutcracker grows to its own size. Then the characters come and play with their toy nutcrackers.

This are not very theatrical, but the kids love them. The bad 

part is that they each want their own while on stage, which 

means the audience will have to wait until they each 

fish their own nutcracker from a basket. Oh well.

Then the nutcracker and all the characters except the Bunny and the Unicorn Pegasus get in a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big battle. And then a small robot puts a large bathtub on a battle. (We still don't have a bathtub. Thomas believes that his family has the perfect box at home.)

This robot, I believe, is a preschool masterpiece

We used one of our scooters as a base, selected the FedEx

box for a body, and the strange object for the head. We

took apart a large fan for the propeller. It's pretty sweet. Sarah,

who is assistant director because she didn't want to be in the

play, will wheel this out.

There is a fire . . .

This is orange, yellow and red tissue paper taped to a fan, but I'm hoping

to scrounge up some cellophane instead. The kids are not satisfied with this.

. . . and all the characters put it out.

Everyone goes in the pool.

This is our failed first attempt at making a giant rainbow nutcracker. We are now 

using it as our pool.

Then the ice age comes and the Unicorn Pegasus timbers down a whole bunch of ice (large foam blocks) and everyone waddles away as fast as they can. 

The Train should only move. The Train goes very fast and breaks down the tracks. He has a accident!

Everybody fell into everybody and they punch each other. Then they punched the blue tree.

I suggested that we paint the trunk blue, but

that idea was rejected out of hand: "Trunks

aren't blue Teacher Tom, just leaves."

Then they punched a rocket.

Inspired by our recent pendulum play, I think, we're

going to try to hang this from the ceiling and take

turns punching it. Luna did most of the work on this

and has tested out its punch-ability.

Then everyone dives into the big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool.

The Unicorn Pegasus ice skates.

Everyone slips and slides.

Everyone goes into a beautiful castle with pretty walls painted pink.

We settled on a very pale pink indeed.

And then everyone dives into a pool.

We're getting a lot of milage out of our failure!

Then Maleficent puts everyone to sleep. Shhhhhh!

And then Maleficent changes from bad to good

This is going to be a challenging "costume change" because assistant

director Sarah, who did not want to be in the play, is going to be

wearing this "puppet" as well.

Maleficent wakes everyone up.

Then everyone flies on top of the Train. Then they land right next to the Train. And they ride the Train. While they are on the Train, they are watching TV on him. (The kids follow Finn around the audience, all of them using their own imaginary remotes!)

It's night time and there is stars . . .

We made these by wrapping small squares of tissue paper

around the ends of pencils, dipping them in glue and

carefully sticking them on tag board stars. Right now the

plan is to each hold up our own stars using the craft stick 

handles, but I'm going to suggest we hang them on string 

from a broom handle and let a parent dangle them overhead 

from "backstage."

And the moon.

We've decided that we're all just going to point at the moon that Julian's

mom painted on our gym wall many years ago.

Everyone stays up in the night. There's gonna be Maleficent. She'll just close her eyes and bonk her head.

THE END