Autonomy

In order to maximize the children's sense of ownership over their experience at Beansprouts, we try to allow children as many opportunities as possible to practice independence.  Now that they are getting older, these experiences have gotten more varied.  I wanted to share one great example of how the "system" has supported autonomy and encouraged leadership.

Usually before snacks and lunch, we call the kids over to the "soap area" to wait for soap to be passed by a teacher or child.  One day, after I made the announcement for lunch, two children approached me.  One of them wanted to pass out the soap and one wanted to call the names of the person whose turn it was to wash their hands.  I said okay and gave them the soap.  Next thing I knew, a beautifully orchestrated system of passing out soap and washing hands had ensued, with Le and Be gracefully taking on the role of leaders.

The Rope Tree

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Mulberry Tree.  

In the fall, it provides fallen leaves that make worms and creatures feel safe enough to come out of the ground.  That's because we rake so rarely that the leaves begin the composting process and worms just love that.

In the spring, new leaves begin to emerge in preparation for 1. feeding silkworms, and 2. providing shade in the summer.

But my favorite contribution of the mulberry tree yet...it's role as The Rope Tree.

One day, we took about ten minutes to hang some ropes and tie some knots and drill some holes and make some swings.  Later, Brianna (our student teacher from DeAnza College), brought a ski rope and hung that from the tree as well.  This has been  most popular activity area for the children.  When they climb, all of the muscles engage, including the core.

There are a few safety features of the ropes we hang on the trees.  First, the hand holds and foot holds are small enough loops that they don't fit over children's heads.  We also have a rule in place that if they want to swing the swing (which is a large, heavy piece of wood), the children must be sitting on the swing.  Otherwise it becomes a huge solid pendulum ready to knock someone out.  Brianna found a way to feed the children's interest in pendulums as well, but I'll post about that later!

Wordless Wednesday

Cut-and-Color Tables

Bev Bos, one of my inspirations in the field of ECE, always has a "cut and color" table available for the children.  Basically, it's an open-ended art station for kids to create something entirely self-initiated.  Last week I tried implementing a cut-and-color theme in the mornings at Beansprouts.  Here's my formula:

• Paper (any kind, any color, depending on the theme)
• Cutters (scissors, hole punchers, or pre-cut somethings)
• Coloring media (crayons, markers, pencils, oil pastels, or even water colors)
• Something sticky (tape, stickers, glue stick)

Here are some of the cut-and-color tables that I set up:

 Masking Tape, Highlighters, Scissors, and Bright paper

Fish cutouts, glue sticks, triangular crayons, blue and white paper

Shape hole punches, Glue sticks, Letter collage pieces, colored pencils

Open-ended creativity has been so under-rated, especially in my generation.  Coloring books and those paint-by-number pages told me how my art should look, while characters in the media became more tightly defined.  The ability to think creatively and outside the box is so valuable in so many contexts.  When I watch the children engage in open-ended art as well as open-ended play, I am reminded how, and why, Beansprouts is a great venue for the child's natural emergence of the self.  They come up with profound ideas and themes in their play, and because it comes from them, it captures their interest beyond anything I could offer.

Miniature playscapes

It started as a Zen garden, but the tiny dinosaurs were a necessary addition.

As beautiful as it was, combining natural elements like metal, salt, wood, and stone,

Nothing can compete with nature's play scapes,

 Inspired by nature, created by kids, a story behind each rock and handful of grass...

Let there be mud!!!

*Stephanie*

Inhibition

Last weekend, I went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of random plank and plywood pieces for the children to use for building (or whatever they came up with).  In the same trip to Home Depot, I purchased some potting soil and wildflower seeds, which I spread along the gate in the photo above.  If you can see in the photo, there are boards resting on top of cinder blocks over the dirt/seeded area.  The purpose of these "benches" (which have mostly been used as balance beams) was to protect my precious little seeds.  I've been carefully tending to the seeds, watering and protecting them from children's footsteps as well as the wrath of Dexter's basketball.  I have a plan, and it's for those little seeds to transform into a beautiful wildflower garden (hear the determination in my voice?).  I'm on a mission.

Well, on Thursday I saw Be leaning plywood pieces against the makeshift benches.  He had a big project going on, complete with hammering things into place (see the green shovel? It's a hammer.)  My first inclination was to say "Can you please find another place to do that because I really don't want the seedlings to get squished."  But I didn't.  I didn't because sometimes I trust the mysterious force that drives children's activities and curiosities more than I trust my own gut reactions.  My gut told me that those planks and boards would squish the life out of the poor little seedlings.  My brain told me that Be was deeply engaged in a creative and planning process and to inhibit it would inhibit whatever neural growth was happening as a result of the activity.  Equally it would rob him of the efficacious feeling resulting from the completion of his task, whatever it was.  So I bit my tongue.  I practiced self-inhibition.

Twenty minutes or so later, Be asked me if there was any more plywood.  "I'm not sure," I said.  "I'll let you know if I see any.  What's it for?"  His response, calm and informing, almost made me cry.

"I'm building a wall so your flowers don't get squooshed."

*Stephanie*

The Weather

Despite the torrential rains today, I had to take some children outside.  Days that feel the super full moon necessitate some outside time.

Of course, as soon as we stepped outside, it went from sprinkling to utter downpour.

 

We played for a while but after a few minutes of getting drenched we huddled under the patio overhang, just me and the boys.  We talked about the rain and the weather and I asked the kids if they thought it would just rain or if they thought we'd hear thunder and lightening.  It was a 50-50 split.

One of the kids began to talk about waves and how the rain could make a big wave.  He didn't seem bothered by the possibility of a big wave, but it was on his mind and he was sharing.  "It will rain and then a big wave will come and it will get everything all wet and it might break something."

I wondered what he had seen on the news or overheard adults talking about that made him think this.  I didn't really know what to say except to make sure that this child did not feel a sense of danger.  I said, "You know, it might rain and rain and rain and get everything wet, but we are very far away from the ocean so no waves are going to get us wet!" He looked at me and said, "But a big wave could come because its raining so hard" and I replied, "Waves come at the beach...we're not at the beach!  We're so far away from the beach.  And are we going to go to the beach today?" "No!" he said, almost giddy, and we laughed like it was the silliest idea ever.  I had a feeling that part of his laughter was relief...but that could be me reading into it a little too much.  Either way, we shared laughter together and that alone brought a ray of sunlight into this dark and dreary California day.

Haiti relief fundraiser we hosted last winter--a PJ party!

*Stephanie*

P.S.  Teacher Tom's post from a few days ago came to mind as I conversed with this child.  I highly recommend it--it's moving.

St. Patrick's Day Recap

The treasure hunt (which also turned into a leprechaun hunt)

The tree bark was the best hiding spot because it looked so beautiful!

 Thumbprint and Button Print Shamrocks (sort of)

(Inspired by...)

 A counting chart

 Treasure Finds in the sensory table

 Whoops!  Who's footprints are those?

 

Fishing for pipe cleaner shamrocks (and pipe cleaner leprechaun beards)

 A variation of this activity

 Garlic and Rosemary Roasted Potatoes

The kids did all the work...including ALL of the potato cutting!

Packing Air Bag Prints

St. Patrick's Day Board Story!

Green Sparkly Rice Crispy Treats!

Dancing to Irish Jigs!

Stephanie vs. The Television (Part I)

Children get many different messages from television, beyond the "lessons" presented in the programming itself.  (Remember how the GI Joe had a safety lesson at the end of each episode?  Yet all I remember is the violence and action in the show.)

Television exposes children to imagery and information that children must process in order to fit into their understanding of life.  Dramatic play (pretend play) serves as an outlet and safe context through which the children make sense of TV input.  It's hard for children to differentiate real and imaginary, and what they see on television might as well be seen right before their eyes.  A child's brain responds to the events similarly regardless of whether it's pretend or real.

At Beansprouts, it started with Superheroes.  I knew right away who were the TV watchers when a child brought an item that displayed popular superhero characters.  The children who knew the superhero scripts swarmed around the child, pointing out the characters, and subsequently engaging in dramatic play that involved angry facial expressions, loud yelling, donning invisible weaponry in what I can only imagine is the way swords and guns are held on the popular TV shows.

And now the battle is on between me and the television.  While children bring into their preschool lives scripts and ideas from inappropriate television programming made with no other purpose in mind than selling ad time, I feel the constant pressure to offer up an alternative reality for them.  However, I'm a lowly preschool teacher with limited resources.  Mattel, Disney, and the big TV market researchers have millions of dollars to spend to try to figure out just how to market to children in a way that will not only captivate them but hold them prisoner, along with their parents.

Did you know that television marketing for children actually encourages children to nag their parents?  Read this brief article on "Pester Power"...it's disturbing.  Children are easy targets  for marketing because they lack the critical thinking that adults have.  And let's face it, as a college graduate with critical thinking skills, I still succumb to the pressures of marketing.

The problem doesn't end with the child who watches graphic television and acts it out.  In fact, the main problem (according to Stephanie) arises when its infectious messages permeate everyone else's play.  Social psychology is a force to be reckoned with, and when a child sees another playing violent superhero games, it looks fun and they want to play the game, too.  Scripts are passed from one child to another ("Let's shoot the bad guy!") and soon the "us vs. them" mentality is on. 

The brain is wired for exclusionary behavior.  Perhaps this capacity for discriminatory thinking helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors decipher dangerous situations from safe ones.  Who knows.  At any rate, it's a human cognitive trait that guarantees that without intervention, children will separate themselves according to the most obvious, visible characteristic (often race because it's the most visual difference).  "Us" versus "the bad guys", the boys vs. the girls, the cool kids versus the uncools...it's inevitable but also our job to make sure to keep it's impact on the child's thinking at bay.

Assumptions made in the superhero script:

• Guns solve problems
• Bad guys are inherently bad rather than good people who make bad choices
• Pretty girls need handsome, rich, or aggressive boys to solve their problems for them
• Good guys are strong white males
• Bad guys are dark complexioned men with foreign accents
• Bad guys always have a stupid bumbling sidekick (okay, this actually might be true)
• You can beat someone up or kill them and then walk away, rather than deal with the gruesome reality of what that actually looks like (ambulance, worried family members, police reports and accountability)

Stay tuned for more on this topic and to see what unfolds as I explore the notion of The Bad Guy (with myself and with the children).  It's a losing battle to try to stop children from acting out the "us versus the Bad Guy" mentality.  What I'd like to do with it is take it in a new direction...where we give the kids an alternative to the ending of the story that goes "and they shot the bad guy and saved the day.  The End."

*Stephanie*

CD prints

Let me start off by saying that I'm not a super huge fan of printing projects.  They tend to generate a mass-production cycle because the kids can make one master and print several pages from it.  I like when other teachers do it, I just tend not to like it myself.  That's why this project started out as a stamp-making project, inspired by Irresistible Ideas for Play-Based Learning (a favorite blog of mine as you are starting to learn!)

We would glue the buttons on the cd's to make our own stamps.  However, I didn't feel like waiting for the white glue to dry, nor did I feel like micromanaging the hot glue guns.  I wanted something a little more instantly gratifying. 

So, instead, with a quick snap of my fingers, the project became CD prints.

CD Prints

Materials needed

• Junk CD's
• Paint and paintbrushes 
• Paper (we used paper that was circular)
• Lots of space to dry final product
• Optional: a tray with a wet and dry towel to wipe off CD's for the next person's turn or have a sink or water bin nearby
• Note: if you place CD's exactly like this, you can fit three on a 8x11 paper (if you want circular prints and to not waste a lot of paper)

What to do

• Paint CD's
• Apply paper and press with hands or roller to make a print

 
Each print is really abstract and colorful and unique.  It was fun to watch the children figure out cause and effect and also to see how vibrant the colors looked on the metallic surfaces. 

Some kids like to stack the prints (there are a couple of stacks in the photo), which is fine with me (these are also the kids who like to fold and crumple up their art...not sure what drives this particular behavior but it always comes up with each group of kids so I'm assuming there is something innate about it...it also highlights the fact that for many kids, it's about the process of creating rather than the final outcome). 

*Stephanie*

Telephone Tubes

We got this idea from a blog but I cannot find the post!  Thank you, blogosphere, for yet another inspiration behind our activities!

[Edit: Just found the link looking for something else! Read it here at Irresistible Ideas for Play-Based Learning)

A few bucks for plastic tubing at the home store, plus a few empty bottles.  What we did:

• cut tubing to desired length (we had to use a saw for all of the cutting in this activity)
• cut off bottom of bottles (you need two bottles per telephone).  If the cut edge of the bottle is sharp, use duct tape to cover the sharp side
• stick tube through the neck of the bottle and secure with duct tape (do this with a bottle on each side)
• leave it in the yard and see who discovers it first

Another rendition of this project, using a longer piece of tube and way more duct tape:

Note: when you buy your tubing, make sure it's flexible.  This one is quite firm and since it came in a roll it was really tricky to get it straight.  Also, if you buy clear tubing it will be that much better for water play for when the kids are done using it as a phone.  (Actually they will probably be done using it as a phone because they discover it's usefulness in water play!)

*Stephanie*