Learning from Preschoolers

May 24, 2013

Today was the last day of school.  One of my goals this week has been to use up a lot of our scrap paper.  It does tend to pile up over the course of the year.  Our construction paper is out and always available to my students.  Next to it is a large wire basket that we put big pieces of scrap paper in when we clean up.  Next to the basket is a bell, like the desk bell in a hotel.  Anyone who uses scrap paper instead of a fresh sheet gets to ring the bell and be thanked for saving paper.

Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.  Fours and fives are not by nature thrifty with paper (or any supplies, for that matter.)  So they begin to learn and we end up with a basket of scraps.  There are several projects we do during the year that use some of them, filling our sensory table with scraps and putting out craft scissors to make fancy cuts, for instance.

So here’s what we did to use up some more.  We took four boxes and taped them shut.  Then we put out glue and our basket of scraps.  We encouraged the kids to cut or tear the paper or just glue it on whole.  It took three days, a box a day.  Thursday no one worked on the fourth box and Friday we got a little bit of decoration.  That’s okay.  I got a great, growing sculpture to fill our display shelves in the hallway, as I gave back their individual art all week long.

May 18, 2013

There was a video making the rounds a little over two years ago.  It featured Holton Rower ( a grandson of Alexander Calder) pouring acrylic paint over large wooden structures.  It was a big hit with several preschool teachers I know and we started looking for a way to do it with tempera rather than acrylic paint.  Acrylic was too expensive but tempera alone wasn’t going to do it. 

My first thought was to thin it down with some water.  It didn’t work.  Meanwhile Tom Hobson in Seattle was thickening it with white glue.  It turned out that the magic formula was 2-3 parts glue to 1 part tempera. 

As soon as I read his blog, I started putting it together…on a much smaller scale than Mr. Rower. We already had wooden cubes.  I glued them 2 high in the middle of pieces of cardboard.  Knowing from experience that kids are perfectly capable of pouring an entire 16-oz. bottle of tempera onto the cubes, we opted for small paper cups, then for sturdier nut cups.  We wanted the kids to change paint colors frequently, in the hopes that previously poured paint would be pushed along.

It worked!  Did it look like Holton Rower’s beautiful pieces.  Well, no, not exactly.  But they were beautiful!

Two years of pour paintings, however, ran us out of my perfect cubes.  I’d seen tall painting done over small terra cotta pots and over nothing at all, just poured onto the cardboard, but I didn’t want to do either of those for various reasons.  So what could I use?

Cups!  Five ounce paper cups!  They were slightly harder to glue to the cardboard, but that just took a few extra minutes of prep time.  Other than that they worked just fine. 

After two days of that, we decided to change it up a bit.  I got some bigger cups and much bigger pieces of cardboard.  We did significantly bigger pour paintings!  

I’m never going back to wooden cubes when cups are so much cheaper!

May 17, 2013

Some of the best moments in class are completely spontaneous…okay, most of them are.  Today a couple of kids put together a train of chairs, dragging them into the middle of the room.  They sat and scooted them forward  in a kind of rough circle.  At that moment I had to leave the room for a couple of minutes to check on something.  (My partner was still there.) 

When I returned there were a lot more chairs in the middle of the room, all of them turned upside down.  They were arranged in three long rows and the kids were lounging against the upturned seat.  Some of them were looking at .books.  Some were playing with stuffed animals and dolls.

I was thinking of asking what they were doing, but I hated to interrupt their game.  Two kids were walking up and down the rows delivering “air packs.”  Air packs?  That sounds kinda like a space ship.  Just then there was a countdown.  Okay, a space ship.  I started snapping photos as fast as I could, knowing this wonderful game could be over as quickly as it started.

Just then another teacher arrived with the answer to the question I’d gone to check on.  The kids invited her to take an empty seat on their rocket.  Being a great teacher, she did, of course! I’d love to share the one photo I managed to get of her but she’s surrounded by too many faces.  Oh, well.   I love my co-workers!

May 13, 2013

A common preschool project is to get a warming tray and put some paper on it and draw with crayons.  The heat from the warming tray melts the crayon as you’re drawing and you end up with thick waxy lines (or blobs, if you hold the crayon in one place for a bit.)  We’ve done it other ways, too.  We’ve arranged pieces of stripped crayons on the paper and let them melt.  We’ve put pieces of crayons in cups on the warming tray and, when they’re completely melted, poured them on a piece of paper.  I’m particularly fond of this last one.  It results in big, very smooth areas of waxy color.

In fact, I was going to do it again this year, but, when I tried it after school one day, I couldn’t get the crayons to melt.  The warming tray was different; perhaps it wasn’t warm enough.  The cups were different, too; perhaps they had too much rim and held the bottom too far off the tray.

Anyway, this is what I came up with for a replacement project.

I had a big bag of stripped crayons ready to go.  I had the kids pick out a piece of construction paper and put it in a low-sided box.  A shirt box or a beer flat would do.  

Then they picked a crayon and put it on the paper.  I held it in place with a wooden ruler.  Then the kids turned on a blow dryer and melted the crayon.

And blew the melted crayon around the paper!  All I had to do was hold the crayon with the ruler and occasionally suggest they get a little closer with the blow dryer.  They did all the rest.

It was, as you can see, great!

May 6, 2013

I love our wooden unit blocks.  We have a large collection because we have the leftovers from other classes that don’t have room to store as many as they’d like to have.  The kids, especially this time of year, are building wonderful things, inventive things, and their constructions can stay up because they are outside on our covered, screened patio. 

As much as I like unit blocks, however, my favorite building toy has to be our tub of granite scraps.  I got them several years ago at Treasures 4 Teachers, a wonderful recycling center in nearby Tempe. 

There are all different shapes of pieces but far and away the most common is long and relatively thin, with three flat sides (call them for the moment the bottom, the front, and the back) sometimes polished and sometimes not.  The fourth side (we’re ignoring the ends right now) is rough and irregular, as if it were broken from a bigger piece…which, I suppose, it probably was.     

Beginning builders can stack the flat sides, one atop another, or they can lay the pieces out in long lines or corrals.  As the kids acquire more skills, they can begin to balance the granite on the jagged edges of the pieces below.  This is when the unique shapes come into play.  Unit blocks teach some things precisely because they’re so regular.  Granite is just the opposite and teaches other things.  What teacher wouldn’t want both in her classroom?

May 3, 2013

We’ve been throwing water again.  We’ve done it for years. 

As I remember, it started one day when I was emptying the water table we had at the time.  (It has long since succumbed to the Arizona sun.) It was smaller than the one we have now, but it was all one piece and, when it was full, it was too heavy to just upend.  So, I had to bail for a while first.  I started, for no particular reason, to toss the water high in the air.  In that moment, water throwing was born.

“Why should I have all the fun?”  The next day, at clean-up time, I took a couple of kids outside to help me bail.  Yup, they had almost as much fun as I’d had.  We had found a new outdoor activity.

The kids use some small blue (medical) tubs we have.  I encourage them to look at the water in the air.  It seems, for a second, to just hang there.  Then it splits apart into a hundred dazzling diamonds (well, if there’s sun…which there almost always is, here in Phoenix.)

Of course the kids enjoy experimenting..  Sometimes the tub goes, too.

They also love spinning the water in a circle around themselves.  This year there was a good deal of filling the small tub with water and dumping it on one’s own head.  It was perfect weather for it.  Some kids got really soaked and still, they were dry by the time they went home a couple of hours later.  Perfect!

May 1, 2013

Thank goodness for First Things First, our new assessor.  They are busy buying things for our playground and look what we got! 

These boards are pricey (about $120 each, I think) but soooo worth it.  They are called curvy boards and they are so open-ended.  Just look at what our kids did with them the very first day.  The first obvious choice is to rock them.  The great thing is that smaller children keep their feet closer together and only rock a little.  Bigger fours and fives can straddle the whole length and rock to their own abilities.  Every child can find their own comfort zone.

 They can also be turned over and stood on, like a mountain top, or used, as one of my girls did, as a springboard for flying leaps.

My favorite idea came from two of my girls.  It’s my favorite because I didn’t think of it at all.  They turned them back and made them into sun lounges!  Need some sunscreen, girls?

When they finished painting the flower house, I man-handled it into the room.  It turned out to be a lot harder than I was expecting.  I had to take the floor apart and collapse the whole house to get it inside.  I set in up in our pretend center and it was an instant hit!

I thought it was perfect and so did the kids….well, all but one.  A girl, working at one of our art tables, turned to me and said “It needs a mailbox.”  Well, she was right!  It absolutely did!  I went back to the “teacher counter” where I found an empty Kleenex box.  I had had other plans for it, but they weren’t as immediate as the need for a mailbox.

I went to tape it to the flower house and the girl came along…I guess to be sure I taped it to her standards.  It was a fantastic idea she had because there was an immediate interest in creating letters to go in the box.  Our writing center hasn’t been that busy since the last time we had a mailbox in the room!

Everyone knows that kids love boxes and the bigger the box the better.  So when a friend showed up at school with a box for us, I immediately dubbed him St. Joe.  (Actually, I’d already dubbed him that for some other things he’s helped with, but they were apart from school and the kids didn’t know him.)  This, however, wasn’t just any box.  It was a refrigerator box!  One he’d seen driving his kids around!  It was big enough for the kids to walk into.  Huzzah for suddenly changed lesson plans!

We began by voting what we were going to turn the box into.  The class came up with four ideas:  a house, a castle, a Hot Wheels house, and a flower house.  Then we voted.  In my class, we never vote by raising our hands.  Fours and fives really don’t get the one man//one vote idea.  They’d raise their hands for all four.  Maybe because they want to vote for the winner?  Or maybe because each idea sounds so good when you’re voting?  Or maybe because they just noticed their best friend raising a hand?  It might be anything, so we vote by standing in different parts of the room.  It helps; there’s still a lot of switching sides when they notice where their friends are standing, but we call a halt to the moving and that’s the final vote.  Flower house was the winner (by a landslide!)

We started painting that very morning.  I marked the door and two windows.  I told the class not to worry about avoiding the windows.  When they were cut out, they could become pictures on the inside of the walls of the house.  So paint away, kids!  It’s the process, not the product.  The product is for playing in…(more to come!)

April 18, 2013

Sometimes you have to give them a little push…not because they need it but you do.  I was getting awfully tired of lumps of clay with sticks in them, with seashells in them, with beads in them.  So one day two weeks ago, I gave a child a lump of clay and asked “Wanna know how to make a pinch pot?” 

They (I don’t remember if “they” was a he or a she) said yes.  I shoved my two thumbs into the center and proceeded to pinch the sides of a very rudimentary pot.  “Can you do that?” I asked balling up the clay again and handing it over. 

Of course, they could and before I knew it, I had a table full of pinch pots drying on our table.  The next day I offered paint and on the third day I got out two small bottles of acrylic glaze “to make them shiny.”  We now had pots in every stage of development and everywhere in between.  One girl, for instance, wanted to glaze her unpainted pot.  Sure, why not! So this went on for a while and then earlier this week a girl asked for some clay and told me that she wasn’t going to make a pot; she was going to make something else. 

She made a long thin animal but didn’t like it.  She started again with the same clay and made a heftier animal.  It was, she informed me a guinea pig.  It actually did look like a long haired guinea pig with no legs visible.  “Do you have a guinea pig?” I asked.  The longer I looked at it, the more like a guinea pig it looked!  “No, we went to a guinea pig store but we DIDN’T GET ONE (this was quite adamant.)  We just went to the store.” 

The next day she wanted to paint it but as she picked it up, the two tiny ears fell off.  I gave her a choice: she could paint the guinea pig and the ears separately and then glue them on OR she could glue them on today and paint it tomorrow.  She ran to get the glue.  The ears were so tiny I finally had to help her glue them on.  Then we covered the drying guinea pig with a bucket to protect the ears from the wind.  (Our clay table is outside.)  She even noticed that the handle of the bucket was caught under one side and she was worried that the wind might get in.  We fixed that. 

I can’t tell you with what trepidation I lifted the pail off the next morning but there were the two ears firmly glued in place.  Hurrah!  The girl spent today painting her sculpture.  She painted a wide white stripe and then wanted brown paint, but she  was stumped.  We were out of brown paint!  So she and I went on a quest to other rooms of the school and found some brown paint.  She then finished the body with a blue stripe. 

The ears were painted blue and the rest of the face brown.  Doesn’t it look exactly like a long-haired guinea pig?  (Are there long-haired guinea pigs or is that hamsters I’m thinking of?) 

That’s when she informed me that the two tiny pieces glued to the head were not ears; they were eyes.  Okay, Rachel, but I still see a guinea pig whenever I look at it, especially in this photo. 

Don’t you?