Unnatural Places

I'm grateful to have the children to distract me from the real world these days.

For the past several weeks, I find myself spending most of my time outside the classroom depressed, seething or mulling over some aspect of the gigantic oil volcano that is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. I want to be pissed off at BP, and I am, and I want to scream at our federal government for letting these modern day pirates cut corners on safety, then naively expecting that pirates will behave like anything other than pirates. I want to look away from the stomach churning pictures of pelicans drenched in oil and dead dolphins on beaches. I want to hear good news, but none of it is good.

I want to blame and punish and rant and rave at the other people, but those pelicans and dolphins are my fault.

I drive a car, I buy things made of plastic, I eat mangos from Mexico and oranges from Chile, I go on vacations in places far away. This disaster is mine.

Yes, I recycle, reuse and compost. I carry my groceries in canvas bags. I walk a lot and take mass transit when it's convenient, but this horrible thing has changed something inside me and it's let me see how pathetic and essentially symbolic my efforts have been. Since it's overwhelming to think of the kind of wholesale changes I need to make in my life, the way I'm going to approach it is that every day I'll do just one more thing to reduce my use of oil. It might just be choosing the ketchup in the glass bottle over the one in the plastic. It might be taking the bus one more day this week. It might be buying produce at my local farmer's market. And some days it might be a big thing like installing solar panels. Something. Every day. That's the plan. And maybe I'll kill one less pelican this year. That would, at least, be something and maybe someday, one step at a time, I won't be killing any. That's the plan.

I was coming to this conclusion yesterday while walking the dogs in Seattle's 350-acre Warren G. Magnusen Park on the site of the old Sandpoint Naval Air Station. It's a quirky, odd-ball park, a mishmash of old hangers, offices and quarters, the city's largest playground, a beach, a boat ramp, sports fields, a hill set aside for flying kites, a large off-leash dog area, art installations, and the crumbling remnants of a military installation that was once home to hundreds of aircraft and as many as 5,600 Naval personnel, as well as 2,400 civilian employees.

There's something about this park, about the way the line is blurred between man and nature, that gives me the sense that I'm simultaneously seeing into the past and future.

"The Fin Project: From Swards to Ploughshares," John T. Young

It's as if we have, on the one hand, freed our artifices, allowing them to rejoin nature through the slow but sure processes of erosion and the lusty miracle of growth. It's in places like this we see that nature will, in sweeps of time too vast for us to regularly contemplate, reclaim what we take from it. Here I see that nature's long term survival is guaranteed. At the same time we're creating new human edifices, ones of hope and peace, mere symbols at this point, but perhaps representing the beginning of the beginning of a plan for survival of our species. Because if nature's survival is guaranteed, ours is not.

My favorite part of the park these days is the 10-acre educational wetlands, an attempt to recreate a tiny piece of the habitat that once existed all along the shores of Lake Washington, officially opened in late 2009. It reminds me the the small woods that our home backed up to when we lived in north-central Germany. As with all the remaining wooded areas in Germany, it is a heavily managed affair, with forest rangers keeping precise counts of both flora and fauna, thinning or adding as deemed necessary for a properly balanced habitat. Sure, sometimes you walk amongst trees that are growing in suspiciously straight lines, but at least they're big healthy trees. And yes the woods did sometimes feel like a large park more than forests, but we would occasionally scare up some wild boar, freezing us in our tracks and reminding us of natural places. It was something.

As the Germans must manage what's left of what were once expansive forests, we'll likewise always have to manage these wetlands.

Someday these marsh ponds will take on more organic shapes

We'll probably always need to fence delicate areas.

Erosion control

We'll sometimes need to direct water flow

It may even one day come to resemble nature the way it must have existed in this spot a century ago before the Lake Washington Ship Canal lowered the water level by 9 feet, then decades later graded it flat to accommodate runways.

But there will always be reminders of the unnatural.

That's a baseball field across this pond.

I see little boxes on the hillside

The paths are here to remind me to keep my dogs from messing with the ducks.

These large drains are there, I suppose, to make sure the

ponds don't get any deeper than the proper 18". That's a

water level guage in the background.

The wood chips laid down by volunteers seem to provide a

nice mulch in which mushrooms can grow, but I have no

idea if they belong here or not.

If these ponds don't dry out on their own during the summer, we'll have 

to help them because seasonal mudflats provide breeding grounds for the

insects that provide food for birds and amphibians. These mudflats are also

essential for discouraging breeding by the non-native bullfrogs that are

predators of some native species.

There are real wild places not terribly far from here, large swaths of the mature rain forest that once covered the entire Pacific Northwest and within them are extensive natural wetlands and other habitats, but all too often what we think are real forests are just greenbelt left along the roadways as a sort of disguise for the clear cut logging that has taken place here for the last several decades. Our own slow motion version of the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

It's clear to me that even we who live in the one part of the world that was once so naturally lush and fertile, according to Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, that its indigenous people never had to develop any form of agricultural in order to feed itself, is now at the stage that it will have to be managed, not for nature's survival, but for our own. We need to create places like these tiny educational wetlands because it's just not sustainable to load our children up into cars and kill more pelicans in order to learn about nature. 

It makes me sad to think that my grandchildren may never walk in woods in which the trees aren't planted in straight lines, just as a part of me is sad to be amongst rectangular marsh ponds, but I'm afraid that is the future of nature if humans are going to continue to be a part of it. Just as we must judge all the "solutions" in the Gulf on a scale of "badness," this seems like the least bad of all the possible futures.

And if we do it right, maybe our grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren will once more walk in nature as something more than the rapacious cancer that I have become. At least, that's the plan.

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Summer Experiments

Our first ever summer program is really, for us, three inter-related experiments in one:

1. Indoor-outdoor: we are testing the viability of running an indoor-outdoor school in our current urban facility.
2. Class size: we are exploring the idea that a well-run cooperative classroom, theoretically, can accommodate classes of any size the community of families chooses.
3. Multi-aged: our 3-5 class has always been a multi-aged classroom, but this summer we are experimenting with expanding our age range to 2-6.

On Friday, I wrote about some of our first-week observations on the indoor-outdoor front, mentioning the "quiet" that we all noticed. One of the hallmarks of Woodland Park, for better or worse, has been our sound level, but a real hush fell over our school last week, one that had us counting and re-counting children because it just didn't seem possible that there were 26 of them (the maximum our insurance company would allow us to enroll) on the premises.

Outdoor learning expert, founder of the Creative Star Learning Company, and a blogger who has helped inspire us along this path toward spending more of our time outside, Juliet Robertson remarked:

Your comments echo those of many who start providing regular free access to outdoor spaces -- children do become quieter and often more engaged in purposeful play. I find there is less "zoochosis" behavior such as frantic running or pedaling on bikes round and round the outdoor space. Research shows that children need at least 45 minutes uninterrupted time to allow deep sustained play to develop and grow.

(I had to look up the word "zoochosis." It's a term used to described the obsessive, repetitive behavior found in many zoo animals.)

It's encouraging to find that we're already replicating the findings of others. 

The part of our experiment involving a larger class size, on the other hand, is one that is so far out of the mainstream that it might not even be in the stream at all. Nearly all the research demonstrates the benefits of smaller class sizes even while early childhood classes here in the US, at least in public schools, continue to grow due to the tendency for politicians of every stripe to balance their budgets on the backs of schools, expecting teachers to do more and more with fewer and fewer resources, all the while merrily pumping money into things like a military-industrial complex that was built to deal with the problems of the prior century.

Political grousing aside, this research is almost all done in traditional classroom settings involving a single teacher and bunches of kids of various sizes. I believe that NAYEC recommends a maximum of a 1:18 ratio in preschools. I think that's crazy. I could never teach a class that size on my own and more power to those of you who do, but I'm more of a 1:8 kind of guy, which is the ratio for which I paid big bucks to my daughter's private kindergarten.

That said, one of the great benefits of the cooperative model is that we add parent assistant teachers to the classroom as we add more kids. Our 3-5 class runs on a 1:3 ratio, while our Pre-3 class is 1:2. There are some homeschools that don't achieve those kinds of teacher to student ratios! Our 3-5 class' policy of inclusion is something that most of us value highly, but it makes us all gulp when it sometimes results in springtime enrollments of 30+. (For the record, due to attrition over the summer months, the largest class we've ever actually had was 24.) At the same time, many of us are convinced that if we should emerge one fall with 30 kids still on the roster, we would not just make it work, but would thrive. We operate as a fully transparent community at Woodland Park and if we all agree, through the process of voting with our feet, to stay together as a larger community.

And while I have plenty of anecdotal evidence that families who voluntarily come together around educating their children in a cooperative community like ours can achieve great things, the specific issue of a very large class size has not actually been tested. Personally, I have every confidence that the free play and station portions of our days will be none the worse, and in some cases improved by a larger class. The one area about which I've had concerns is circle time.

The idea of getting that many preschoolers, all those individual suns around whom the planets revolve, to do anything together would be a feat, let alone sitting together for 20-30 minutes of singing, stories, discussions, and dancing.

So it was with some trepidation that we assembled on our blue rug this week, all 26 of us, ranging in age from 2-5, many with very little circle time experience under our belts. I started each session off with some high-energy, full body songs like our anthem "Jump Jim Joe," then got us on our bottoms with some of our more rollicking sit-down songs. Finally we slowed it way down with the felt board. 

Generally speaking the younger the crowd, the more time I like to spend on singing song after song, while group discussion is more the hallmark of my circle times with older kids. I'm still working on it, but I'm pleased with the balance I achieved last week, mixing in short discussions between songs, while sticking to a fairly rapid-fire program of both old and new songs.

One week is too early to draw conclusions, but not a single child attempted to wander off, eyes tended to be on me, and participation was pervasive and enthusiastic. Early in the year Pre-3 circles are usually typified by 2-year-olds bouncing up off their bottoms in an attempt to interact with me personally, trying to snatch things from the felt board, or (as in the case of Charlie L. last year) trying to bite my thighs while we sang. But there was none of that this week in spite of a large proportion of young 2-year-olds in the mix. In fact, some of them spontaneously started raising their hands in imitation of the older kids, and I was successful in eliciting participation from every child in our brief group discussions.

I've been told to expect the 2-year-olds to really "step-up their game" in a classroom of older children and that seems to be what's happening and not just at circle time. I've likewise been impressed with the gentleness with which the older kids have so far been interacting with their younger classmates. For instance, while playing "What Time Is It, Mr. Fox," on Thursday, I noticed Jack frequently placing his hands on the shoulders of young kids who weren't stopping on the proper count, often successfully "persuading" them to wait beside him until the next instruction. Pretty cool. 

There is still a long way to go, and hopefully a lot to learn, but if this first week is any indicator, each of our experiments seem to be progressing just as our theories would suggest. 

I'm eager for next week to see if these trends hold as the children settle in. Can you tell I'm excited?

The Truth Will Make Me Free

I just planned to share the lyrics today to one of my favorite Mister Rogers songs, "The Truth Will Make Me Free," but in the fruitless search for a video or recording of the song, I found myself lost on the internet, viewing video after video of this incredible educator and life-long advocate for children.

The last time I mentioned Mister Rogers here, it was brought to my attention that if you didn't grow up in the US or Canada, you probably don't know about him. Even if that's not the case for you, I urge you to spend a little time this Saturday taking a look at some of the 26 full length episodes available here.

Mister Rogers taught children that confronting feelings and giving them appropriate expression is a sign of strength, not weakness:

"It takes strength to acknowledge our anger, and sometimes more strength yet to curb the aggressive urges anger may bring and to channel them into nonviolent outlets. It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to. It takes strength to talk about our feelings and to reach for help and comfort when we need it."

Here are the lyrics I wanted to share:

The Truth Will Make Me Free

What if I were very, very sad

And all I did was smile?

I wonder after awhile

What might become of my sadness?

What if I were very, very angry

And all I did was sit

And never think about it?

What might become of my anger?

Where would they go,

And what would they do,

If I couldn't let them out?

Maybe I'd fall, maybe get sick

Or doubt.

But what if I could know the truth

And say just how I feel?

I think I'd learn a lot that's real

About freedom

I'm learning to sing a sad song when I'm sad

I'm learning to say I'm angry when I'm very mad

I'm learning to shout, I'm getting it out

I'm happy learning exactly how I feel inside of me

I'm learning to know the truth

I'm learning to tell the truth

Discovering truth will make me free

But Mister Rogers did much more than teach children. This first clip shows him testifying before the US Senate in an attempt to save funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The senator starts out sounding like he wants to pick a fight, but ends by being entirely won-over. I love that Mister Rogers quotes, on the floor of the Senate, in it's entirety, the lyrics to one of my other favorites, "What Do You Do With The Mad That You Feel?" This just makes me proud to be a preschool teacher.






And this is Mister Rogers accepting his Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award. This humble man, even at this moment, one that is all about him, used it as another opportunity to teach others about themselves and to remind them that they are loved. I'd never seen it before and it made me cry. 







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Instead We Listened

We've noodled around the idea of a summer camp at Woodland Park every year I've been here, but it's always come down to me choosing time off over a pay-check, usually a decision made without much of what could be called noodling.

But this summer is different. We embarked on a new era at Woodland Park this year, a great community experiment, one in which every family in our school has had a hand. I'm inspired like I've never been before and I'm looking forward to this summer as an opportunity to tinker around with the concepts and skills we'll need to understand and master before we can confidently take the next big step.

In a nutshell, our little commie cooperative is on the road toward becoming an urban outdoor preschool. There is a growing trend toward forest, adventure, and other outdoor schools, both here in the US and around the world, but what characterizes most of those endeavors is their adjacency to large tracts of land in which to enact an outdoor curriculum. Since it's unlikely we're going sell our houses en mass and move to the country, and if we still want to offer our children the benefits of an outdoor school, it's going to have to be done within the confines our our little courtyard and garden.

Our first step came this winter when we unanimously agreed as a community to revamp our outdoor space, followed by a mid-year agreement to temporarily transform our curriculum to put the children outdoors for about half our school day. It would be a big deal for any school to change its curriculum in mid-stream like that, but even more so in a cooperative where it's not just the children who will be outside rain-or-shine, but their parents as well. And if you read my post from yesterday, you'll know that there is more rain than shine up here in the Great Northwest, so it's not a decision to be made lightly.

The next step was again an unanimous springtime vote, based on our experience, to permanently change our curriculum to put a greater emphasis on outdoor education.

The main reason I wanted to host a 3-day-a-week summer program at Woodland Park is to continue this experiment of moving toward becoming an outdoor school, our at least an indoor-outdoor one. After our first full week of turning off the heat and throwing open the doors, I'm more excited than ever.

We've had a decent week from a weather perspective with one coolish, drizzly day sandwiched between two pleasant mornings, one of which was even sunny. The real challenge, of course, will come in attempting it in mid-winter when it's windy, rainy, dark, cold, and has been that way for months. I'm not saying we can't do it. In fact, I've had several discussions this week with parents who are all-in for a year-round rain-or-shine indoor-outdoor curriculum, but it's nice to be getting our feet wet, so to speak, as the weather is turning dryer and warmer.

If I was to sum-up our experience so far in a single word, it would be quiet.

That's a word that has never been used to describe Woodland Park, at least not since the advent of Teacher Tom and his insensitivity to decibels. It's not that bad, really, but I do start each year by reminding our parent assistant teachers that my brain tends to interpret loudness from children as joy, so if things are getting out of hand, the other adults may need to draw my attention to it. Making this "quiet" all the more astounding is the fact that we've enrolled 26 kids in this first session, a giant class by our standards. (This is another of our summer experiments. We're working on the theory that a cooperative school, with it's surplus of assistant teachers, can effectively accommodate larger enrollments than traditional schools.)

Of course, the fact that the kids are now spread out over a much larger space, and the absence of walls and ceiling off which to bounce our squeals and screams, contributes to this phenomenon, but as parent educator Dawn and I stood together observing the play on Tuesday, we also saw each and every child, from the youngest 2-year-old, to the most sophisticated and experienced 6-year-old, quietly, purposefully engaged in their play. (This is yet a third of our summer experiments: an expanded age-range in our multi-aged classroom.)

This "quiet" is something we also noticed during the regular school year once we moved more of our play outdoors. I've come to understand that bursts of sound from young children may well be sounds of joy, but sustained loudness might just be there to fend off boredom.

As Dawn and I stood there sharing observations, I recalled a day earlier this year, before the playground transformation, when Annabelle mounted to the top step and started screaming. It wasn't a scream of pain or emotion, but just a scream. I took is as an experiment with her voice. One-by-one her classmates joined her until they were all clutched together on the top of the steps, like an impromptu choir, screaming at the top of their lungs. This went on for at least 20 minutes, the bulk of what served as our outdoor time back then. They were just screaming, not singing, not chanting, just standing together and screaming. 

At the time, I was proud that they had, all on their own, found something to do together, but now, looking back, it's hard not to hear it as a scream for something more than pavement, slides and monkey bars. 

It would have been easy to shush them, but instead we listened.

Mud!

I was going to post about how the kids used the new blocks I made for them . . .

. . . but I forgot to get out the camera, and since I named them "blocks," most of the sculptures we assembled using bamboo skewers and twine were dismantled at the end of play. I got some pictures of some of the structures put together with bailing wire . . .

. . . but frankly the kids were most engaged with the scissors, wire cutters, and hand drills, which they used for making their own holes in the wood. Two-year-old Vaughn had to stand on a milk crate to get enough leverage to bore through the wood, but man was he proud when he managed it!

Instead, however, I'm going to write about mud.

A couple days ago, Catherine at Squiggle Mum wrote a terrific post about playing and learning in the rain, but what struck me most was how special rain was for the children of Queensland where they get so much scorching sun that the schools have the rule "No hat, no play." Kids in rainy Seattle, on the other hand, sometimes object to going outside because it's "too bright."

We live in what was once a vast rain forest. The first European Americans to record their experiences exploring the Northwest, the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition, named their time at Fort Clatsop (on what is now the Oregon-Washington border) "The Winter of Discontent." They reported that of their 106 days here, only 12 were free of rain and only six were sunny. Living here, it's easy to look outside at the grey and wet, even if it isn't cold, and decide to just hunker down until summer like Lewis and Clark did. But Catherine's post has had me seeking out the beauty I've been overlooking these past several months, seeing my world through the eyes of those kids in Brisbane.

Yesterday afternoon we had a nice downpour after which I took the dogs for a walk in the Pandora in my back yard and snapped pictures of our most ubiquitous natural phenomenon: mud.  I did so while listening to the B-52's latest album, "Funplex," which provided an interesting, and not entirely inappropriate soundtrack to our walk.

First you have to put on your boots.

"He's a mess, but he's really pretty!"

"I, I, I'm looking for some fun . . ."

"Crazy planet . . ."

"Caught in the splendor . . ."

"Spread your seed on fertile ground . . ."

"Let's go down to our secret place . . ."

"We're on auto cruise to a strange latitude . . ."

Some mud is just an abstract painting.

"Liquid lover, you bottled it right . . ."

"Yum, now this is what water should taste like!"

"They do the slow boogaloo in the driving rain."

"Tell your skirt to take a hike!"

"Hey lady!

What?

What lady?"

There were adult sized bare footprints in this mess!

"I got to have it."

"Well it all seems so simple."

"Have you tried it?"

"We're in deep."

"So intense, no sense, but feeling fine."

"Now I can smile."

"It's what we like!"

"Here we are."

"Wild eyed in a crazed haze."

"Follow your bliss."

"I just can't resist."

"Pleasure is calling you . . .

"Take this party to the White House lawn."

"Love the way that you move that stuff."

We even ride our bikes in mud.

"It's part of this earthly delight."

"You're a force of nature. Can't be controlled."

"We've gotta be part of this universe."

And you'll want to wear boots.

It's Summer

(Note: Thank you for all the incredible ideas for using our hundreds of vinyl belts! Holy cow, you guys are a creative bunch. I was genuinely stuck on how to use them; now I feel like I have a treasure on my hands. We have enough of them to try every single idea. I'll keep you updated on how it goes, giving credit where credit is due, of course.)

Everyone seemed to arrive all at once on our first day of our summer program yesterday and a bit of a snarl of parents and children developed in our entry area as everyone figured out name tags, coat hooks, signing in, and the other niceties of getting going on our first day, but after that I'm happy to report that things went so astoundingly smoothly that I'm pounding on wood with both fists today in the desire to keep those tommyknockers at bay.

We've never run a summer program before and, frankly, I've never wanted to before now. There is no other feeling like that of standing at the end of May on the precipice of 3 whole months of summer, freed from having to be anywhere at any particular time. It's not about sleeping in for me, nor lazing about. When I have typically looked forward into those 3 months, it's with an eye toward spending uncounted hours listening to baseball games on the radio while engaged in home improvement projects. Others use their summer vacation for getting out of town, but frankly, they're fools. We've lived through our nine month rainy season and it would be a real pity to miss the glories of summer in a place made as lush and mild as this one. And since I'm not a lounging by the pool type, there is nothing I love more than to putter around the garden in the sunshine, covering the driveway with saw dust while replacing the upstairs baseboards, or learning a new skill, like the time I spent a week applying stucco to a cinderblock wall.

But this summer is different because of our new outdoor classroom (and because we're selling our house, which means I have to keep the driveway tidy). The idea from the very start was to transform our curriculum into one that put a much greater emphasis on outdoor learning. We took great strides during the last 3 months of school as we allowed the children to show us how to use our new space, what was missing and what was superfluous, but I felt as if we were just hitting our stride as the school year wound down. I'm excited about continuing the experiment without a gap in between.

About half the kids there yesterday are new to Woodland Park so there was a great deal of simple exploring, accelerated by the play of the more experienced children who know their way around. The bulk of our day yesterday was spent outdoors, making "duck ponds" and "swimming pools" in the sand pit, creating our own "stress balls", playing with our worms, riding the unicycle merry-go-round, painting, identifying the plants growing in the garden (I made "check lists" with pictures of the food we expect each plant to produce, then the children hunted for the matching garden signs), and exploring Little World.

Indoors the kids could drop by the snack table or take a few quite moments with the play dough or a book, but those were, as I'd hoped, not particularly well-frequented stations.

I'd been prepared to have to help some of the kids, especially some of the younger ones, get engaged, but whenever I paused to take stock all I saw were busy, focused children, playing together in mixed age groups. So busy and focused in fact, that parent educator Dawn Carlson and I were convinced that many of the 26 kids had missed their first day. The vibe was so calm and quiet that we guess there were only 15 or so on the premises, but however we counted it, we came up with 25. I wonder if that will continue.

We had a rollicking circle time, erupted our volcano repeatedly, played Caps For Sale with our hundreds of hats, quietly worked puzzles, and rowdily rode our wheeled vehicles in the gym, all in 2.5 hours.

It was a pleasant day yesterday, not sunny nor particularly warm, but it felt a lot like summer anyway as I stood in my driveway. I then turned on the baseball game and got busy with the miter saw and drill, making a new set of blocks to play with today.

I got the idea for these "blocks" from Childhood Magic. They used them to make snakes over there, and you can see the beginnings of my own snake in the picture. I'm planning to combine them with twine and yarn needles, as well as bailing wire, and bamboo skewers. I've pre-drilled holes in most to them, as well as in some longer pieces of stick, but left several un-drilled for the kids who want to break out our eggbeater drills. I'm taking my jig saw with me today, just in case we need more. I can't wait for them to show me how to use them.

There's saw dust on the driveway. It's summer.

What Would You Do With Them?

This isn't going to be much of a post today, but I need your creative input.

As I've written here before, being a preschool teacher has really distilled and perfected my bag lady tendencies, leading to a habit of holding onto junk that we may or may not one day be able to use. Yesterday, while I was working at the school to get things ready for Woodland Park's first ever summer camp, I got diverted into our boxes of hats. A couple years ago, a costume or party supply store got rid of overstock and we wound up with (I'm not exaggerating) 300 child-sized hats of various descriptions. They're a pain to store, but I can regularly find uses for hats so they're worth keeping.

These hats, however, came with a curse. I also have a large box full of these shiny, vinyl-like kid-sized belts:

Again this is no exaggeration, but we have over 200 of these things, mostly the red ones. I've not been able to come up with an idea for what to do with them and they're a pain to store. I should throw them out, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it yesterday.

I've put a couple bundles out for the kids to horse around with today, but I've tried that a couple times before and their best idea so far has been to swing them around in a hazardous manner.

So, I'm giving these belts one more chance to become a contributing part of the Woodland Park's community by sending this plea-question out into the world: What would you do with them?