A Home Within A Home Away From Home

It's always good to be back home, as well as to be back here in blog-space trying to untangle my thoughts and impressions of a week in North England where I participated in the EarlyArts International UnConference on November 9, both as a work shop leader and panelist, as well as a delegate. 

I suspect I have a bunch of posts in front of me about the conference, the schools I visited, the people I met, and the things I learned, but sitting here in the comfort of my home in drizzly Seattle, all I can think of are my hosts Ruth, Pat, Evan and Chaia, who shared not just their home with me for a week, but also the warmth and love of their family.

Six-year-old Chaia greeted me at the Liverpool John Lennon Airport with a portrait . . .

. . . and a message that was balm to a frazzled traveler.

It was a declaration of intent from the heart of the most gracious hosts on earth. And when we pulled over on the way home to drop her off at a birthday party, her 9-year-old brother Evan pulled himself away from his fun, including fireworks, to meet this tired, old stranger with those hard American R's and flat A's. And when we arrived home where he had vacated his room for me, I found another greeting pinned to the bulletin board above the bed.

No traveler has ever been made to feel more at home. 

When Ruth (who, not incidentally, while in the midst of hosting me, was also in charge of the UnConference) left to retrieve the children at their party, I, in the spirit of trying to stay awake until a decent bed time, set out for a quick tour of this village set in the midst of the moody moors I'd only known from the novels of Thomas Hardy. It was hard to take a photo of the countryside that didn't look like a painting.

And I've struggled and failed to come up with a less cliched word than "charming" to describe their home and the village around it.

I really would love to have a crack at building one of these characteristic

stacked stone walls.

After a great night's sleep in Evan's comfortable bed, I met Pat and the kids down the hill in Holmfirth, where even the English use the word "charming," being as it is the setting for the long-running BBC program The Last of the Summer Wine, a show that oozes charm from its digital pores.

There at the twice annual art market, we ran across this crazy construction.

Made from bamboo garden canes, cable ties, cloths pins and fabric, artist Chris Harman had built this "den" ("cubby" in Australain; "fort" in American) using, by his estimate, 1000 canes. (Click here to see a picture of a den from one of his museum installations incorporating 10,000 canes.)

Children, including Evan and Chaia, raced wildly though it, shrieking and giggling. Naturally, I had to buy the proffered The Den Experiment starter kit. After all, it was clear that children enjoyed the end result. Now we would take some home and experiment to see if real world children could manage the construction technique.

Before I'd even thought to break out the camera, we'd used up the materials in the tube. Fortunately, Pat found more canes, ties, and pins in the garage, and Evan and Chaia took it from there.

The children, clearly practiced den builders, knew where the extra fabric was kept.

In the coming days and weeks as I write about UnConferences, work shops, schools and education, the presumed reasons for my trip, be aware that it was all secondary to this home within a home away from home, and how at home Ruth, Pat, Evan, and Chaia made to feel there.

 And it's good to be back.

Earlyarts International UnConference (With Two Project Updates)

Installing our concrete pavers

Tomorrow morning I'm hopping a plane for Halifax, England where I will be taking part in the Earlyarts International UnConference on Tuesday, November 9.

I'll be running a workshop called Parents As Partners In Their Children's Learning as well as serving on a discussion panel later in the day.

Earlyarts is England's largest professional development network for people working creatively with children and families in the arts, cultural and early years sectors, providing resources with an eye toward helping develop skills to be employed in building creative learning environments and to embed a playful learning culture. Needless to say I'm honored to have been asked to take part, and particularly excited to meet colleagues from England and around the world, not to mention the keynote address from Sir Ken Robinson (who makes regular "appearances" on this blog, including both here and here) a patron of Earlyarts.

We decided to paint our giant glue collage gold

I'll be staying for the entire week and my hosts have organized a full itinerary for me. I'll be visiting early learning centers, schools, and other institutions that work with young children, where I'm sure I'll learn a lot while hopefully sharing some little piece of what I've learned about working with young children and their parents with my colleagues in England.

What will Woodland Park do without me for a week? What all cooperative preschools do. Our parent-teachers will be running their own school. I've left detailed instructions, but I've also encouraged my 5 official teacher assistants to work with their own child in figuring out what they want to do on the days I'm away. These days and weeks when I'm absent from class are probably the most child centered, child generated days they get all year. Our families could not be in better hands -- their own.

Perhaps the biggest news (at least as it impacts the readers of this blog) is that I'm not taking my laptop with me. I've written over 500 posts in the past 16 months, putting something up nearly every day, and I'm looking at this as an opportunity to take a little break and recharge a bit. And man what a way to recharge, to be surrounded by early childhood professionals, parents and creativity experts!

That said, I will of course have access to the internet while I'm away so it's possible I won't be able to keep my fingers off the keyboard . . .

Rotting Season

The jack-o-lanterns are getting good now, growing their fuzzy pumpkin mold and getting mushy: it's rotting season. Their faces are collapsing on themselves. Some of the kids are saying they're stinky, but I'm not smelling it. I think they're using their imaginations.

We don't have room in the garden anymore to let all 10 of our jacks rot out there the way we've done for the past 8 years, but we have salvaged a small rectangular patch of ground that we've dug out to accommodate 3 or 4 of them.

Living in the city, we sometimes have look harder if we want to observe natural processes. The countryside or forests are full things in various stages of decay, but in the city we tend to clean them up before they get interesting to avoid those unpleasant odors (phantom or otherwise) and the real possibility of attracting vermin.

We played a game of "break or bounce" yesterday, culminating with the last fairly solid pumpkin. This game is a version of the classic preschool game of "sink or float," whereby we climb atop a table or ladder and drop various items onto the asphalt, predicting whether that particular item will break when it hits the ground or bounce. We dropped the large jack-o-lantern three times for good measure (although I think the kids might have been more impressed with the baby food jar).

We'll spend the next few weeks discussing the pumpkins as they become increasing indistinguishable from the dirt, using words like "decomposing" and "decay." Many of our families have taken this project on at their own homes, finding a place where their prized squash can slowly melt into the ground. We'll aid the process by chopping, digging and adding choice morsels to our worm bin.

One day, months from now, someone will discover a woody stem and we'll all remember the pumpkins that used to be there. In the spring a few of the seeds that the crows and squirrels have missed will sprout and we'll have vines to tend.

Hunting For That Moment Of "Ah Ha"

A former Woodland Park parent recently opened up his iPhone and repaired a button that had ceased to function. Of course, he invalidated his warranty, but still, he's now on my list of every day heros.

A few years ago, my "new" vacuum cleaner stopped working so I took it into Sears where I'd purchased it 2 years earlier. The salesman told me it would cost almost as much to repair as buying a new machine. When I made aggravated noises, he answered, "Most vacuum cleaners are only designed to last 2 years, so, you know, you're right on schedule." Nothing gets my goat more than being taken for a sucker. Knowing absolutely nothing about how these machines work, I took it home, removed the screws, figured it out and made a repair.

People don't believe me, but honestly, I'm no more technically skilled than anyone reading this. I've spent most of my life throwing out "new" machines just like everyone else, but during the past several years, I've grown increasingly concerned about the waste both personally and environmentally. That Sears vacuum is still functioning, living in the garage for when I need to clean out car. Our indoor machine lives most of its life with its guts exposed so that I can more easily apply the duct tape and other repairs it needs on a regular basis. It ain't pretty, but man it makes me happy each time I service it myself. I wish I could tell you that the satisfaction I feel is about the contribution I'm making to the environment, but it has much more to do with going one more day without falling economic victim to a corporation trying to make a buck off planned obsolescence. 

Still, there remain a lot of machines that I can't do anything about, so they come into school where I turn them over to the kids. We're currently working on an old coffee mill, a power drill, clock radio, and a DVD/VCR.

It was exciting last week when Connor discovered that he could open the DVD drawer by turning a little white gear. It somehow released a catch that had thwarted past efforts. On Monday, four days after this success, he raised his hand, and in detail, described to his classmates how he'd done it.

We'll work on these machines until they are in little pieces, then we'll probably break out the glue guns and either create some sort of sculpture or collage from the parts. Last year, for instance, we used various bits and pieces to create the robot for our Pre-K play (this is a link to the video of A Beautiful Nightmare, a production produced stem-to-stern by 4 and 5-year-olds):

But whatever we wind up doing with the pieces, it's my hope to start taking some of the mystery out of the insides of machines, to teach children to not be intimidated by those stickers bearing warnings about their own incompetence.

These machines are broken anyway, and more often than not they're designed to be thrown away, so why not poke around inside? You know the repair bill will almost exactly match the purchase price of a new one. The day isn't in the too distant past when being able to perform basic repairs was considered a fundamental aspect of ownership. The Model-T came with a tool kit.

I don't know how to fix these machines myself, of course, that's why the kids are getting a crack at tinkering around with them, and maybe, like Connor did, they'll figure out how something works and even if that specific knowledge doesn't stick, hopefully, that feeling of success, that sense of competence and mastery will become a part of how he approaches life.

It's true that most of the kids, especially the 2-year-olds, are just poking their screwdrivers into holes, but that's how it starts, just opening the things up and looking around, trying your tool here and there, hunting for that moment of ah ha.

Getting to do it together is just a bonus.

It's The Troll's Night

The troll who lives under the Aurora Bridge celebrated his 20th birthday last night, which, in case you didn't know, is the real reason people dress up in costumes on October 31.

That's a long time to stay down there in the shadows munching on the stray cars that come his way (that's a vintage VW Beetle in his left hand). We've made the assumption that he likes to see us out playing in the street on Troll Avenue North, but no one knows for sure because he's made of concrete and never even cracks a smile.

That's probably why we wear costumes, so he doesn't recognize us, on the off chance he just wants to be left alone. Trolls, I think, are known for bearing grudges and I drive over that bridge every day. I played it safe in my pink bunny ensemble.

Ricky Gene stood on the Troll and told us that 4 fingers from Elvis' left hand are inside the Beetle.

We trotted out some zombie belly dancers for our entertainment if not his.

Then a host of skeleton drummers and dancers marched up the hill to lead us in a parade through the streets of Fremont. I walked most of the way with Zsa Zsa and Jasper's dad Peter, a Woodland Park family from years ago.

But we didn't stay exposed for long because it's the Troll's night, and as everyone knows, trolls live under bridges, in this city of bridges. So it was under the Fremont Bridge that we stopped to dance.

A few other Woodland Park alumni, both kids and parents, where there under the bridges as well, howling, dancing, and celebrating the Troll. Aurelia even gave me candy from her trick or treating stash.

It makes me happy to live in a place where adults haven't forgotten how to play.