sol17-1 What about freedom?

I am participating in the
Slice of Life Story Challenge (SOLSC).
All participants are writing about one moment, one part of their day, every day of March 2017.

A big thank you to Two Writing Teachers for providing this unique opportunity

for teacher-writers to share and reflect.

This is my sixth year of participating in the Slice of Life Story Challenge. I am excited to be back! Writing each and every day is energizing. Each year, I am amazed by how much more present and observant I become in my teaching during this month of March, as I try to unearth writing topics. Truly, I notice more. Here's to reconnecting with many writers and discovering new voices, as well. Welcome, new slicers! Welcome, one and all! Let's write!

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Tomorrow is our second trimester's "Learning Showcase," an evening event where families come to see what we have been exploring and discovering. Much of today was spent encouraging and guiding children to tie up loose ends on their projects. I think I am most excited about the children's wire sculptures. Let me share a few. (You'll notice that each child wrote their own nametag for the piece- I love seeing the strides each preschooler has made in printing.)

I am excited about how unique each piece has become. It has been a rich observation experience for me, gaining so much insight about each child. For example,

• some children linger and work, adding details, adjusting, fine-tuning, seeming without end,
• others wonder only about the beads, collecting those of a certain color or size, adding 'bling' to their sculpture
• several come to the table simply to converse with their peers, fingering materials, not really adding or modifying,
• a few enjoy adding wires and then unwinding them, taking them apart, and putting it back together,
• one little girl worked hard to make every wire strand the same length,
• others worked on wrapping, wrapping, wrapping, making the wire coils tight, and
• some worked large - adding height and girth, trying to make it 'the biggest one'.

Way back when we were planning this art exploration, our Phillips Collection art advisor gave us an umbrella theme of "freedom."  Certainly, wire - with its free-form possibilities - allowed for so many fun and creative way to express "freedom" but this seemed too abstract a concept for my youngsters. What is freedom? I asked the preschoolers as they worked, to no clear avail. What does it mean to move freely? I continued. During several whole groups, we moved our bodies in fun, free ways.

Then, I simply listened to the children as they worked. What were they saying? What were they wondering? What were they discovering? Here's a poem I wrote based on their musings as they worked with wire:

Our Freedom Sculptures

(A collaborative poem by the Big Cats)

This is my freedom thing:

a lot of beads in a long line,

moving like a big monster,

a freedom bunny.

Moving like a train

like flowers,

two sparklies around a flower.

Moving like a truck.

Beads can move.

All the beads,

wiggly,

orange and black,

pink beads on pink lines,

moving side to side,

twirling around on the wire,

swinging.

I want the same.

When you are free,

it’s a little bit kind of loose.

It turns,

it can bend,

like a circle,

stopped in air,

going back and forth

tall and free,

it goes to the end.

-->

This is my freedom thing.

After school, my Teaching Resident and I made a strong effort at cleaning and culling clutter, so that the classroom will make a beautiful first impression tomorrow evening. There is still plenty to do before the event tomorrow night! 

What about wire?

This is a Tuesday
Slice of Life.
All participants are writing about one moment, one part of their day. 

A big thank you to Two Writing Teachers for providing this unique opportunity

for teacher-writers to share and reflect.

The Big Cats are creating wire sculptures for our Phillips art project.
First, we need to investigate the wire -
How does it feel? 
What can it do? 
How does it bend and move?
We looked at a video of one of Alexander Calder's moving mobiles.
Could we create sculptures that move?
Yes, let's try this!

I have set the wire supplies up as an exploratory center, so that the children will learn more about how the materials work before they create their wire sculptures.

We have three different gauges of wire, and all three types are flexible enough for the preschoolers to manipulate. They quickly figured out that the thicker the wire, the more difficult it is to bend. I love that there are three types of wire - multi-colored fine wire, silver medium wire, and bluish thick wire. As they practice making loops, bends, knots, connections, and more, preschoolers are also reinforcing their understanding of small, medium, large.

We spent a couple days simply wrapping objects, to see what shape the wire would be once we pulled the wire out. So many questions arise,
What shape will the wire have if we bend it around a block?
What happens if we attach two wires together?
How can we make the wire curvy?

We are also working with a variety of beads.  The preschools love to finger these, picking out their favorites. They practice how to connect the beads to the wire.
How might we attach the bead so that it wiggles? 
How can we make it roll up and down the wire?
How can we make it stay in a more fixed?

It is a kind of slowing down.
Slow learning.
Investigating requires focus. And fine motor skills.
We become better and better at it.

I hear,

Can I play with the wire?

Look, I make a balloon!

Chains are made out of wire!

You can spin it.

I want to tie it.

I make it move.

This is hanging on it!

It's like candy.

Moving slowly like an artist,
an engineer,
a mathematician,
a scientist. 

It is language,
it is storytelling,
it is everything at once.
It is the best kind of learning.

My husband cut up some scrap wood to make simple wood bases for their sculptures. Tomorrow, the open-ended investigation of wire will end, and we will take our first steps at creating the sculptures themselves. The goal is to make a sculpture that shows 'freedom' -
Maybe it will move, bend, wiggle? 
Maybe it will reach high or flow to the side? 
What does freedom look like?  

The children will have the flexibility to go any direction they want with the remaining supplies. I will encourage the preschoolers to use the heaviest wire at the base and to add lighter wires as they move up. But, preschoolers always amaze me with their ideas and innovations, and I am ready to be surprised and enlightened. I feel certain that their sculptures will have a lot of individuality, that no two will look alike. 

The children are fascinated by the wire. I am, too. 

Tuesday SOL What about the Art Center?

This is a Tuesday "Slice of Life" for Two Writing Teachers. Check out their website for lots more reflections on teaching.

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I am loving the art center in my new classroom. It is an ideal space, with a beautiful big window right nearby, giving such great light to all that we do here. Plus, it is equipped with a sink, cabinets, and counter, allowing me to set up and clean up with ease.

This area includes a table for small group work, a clay station, and two easels. There is a place to hang art that is drying. There is a small shelving unit, filled with art materials that the children have learned how to use through various "guided discoveries" this school year - glue, paint, scissors, collage materials, oil pastels, yarn, recyclables and other "junk."

I am slowly but surely making it into a space where children have total flexibility with their creative explorations.

We make sure there is paint set up at the easels at the start of each day. I love the way children wander over to the easels, sometimes grabbing a smock from the bin, sometimes not, and they just begin painting. The easels are in almost continuous use from the moment the classroom door opens each morning. 

The clay table has ample room for three artists but I've noticed that it is often home to just one artist at a time. How nice this is for the artist! Here, the children enjoy pounding and cutting the clay, making designs with clay tools, and rolling and patting it back into balls…I think it is a very nice corner for solitary exploration. The children are also intrigued by how to take care of the clay, enjoying the responsibility of adding water to it, keeping it moist and pliable. 

At the small group table, we set up a variety of process art activities, with materials for the children to create and explore with abandon. There aren't specific rules for this work - children consider what they want to do with the materials at hand and begin creating as they desire. It is magical and free-flowing work. 

Typically, we'll do the same exploration all week long. 

The children love this area of the room and it is in constant motion.

 

I love how they are free to choose between so many creative activities on a daily basis…

paint? clay? glue? cutting? three-dimensional? mixed media? 

The choice is theirs. 

I know this area of our classroom is working well when I watch the children…

• Simona, lost in concentration, with the perspective of a scientist on the brink of a new discovery, holding a length of yarn in each hand, dipping the center into paint, pulling the strand taut, seeing her paper instantaneously covered in speckles; she greets this discovery with sheer delight and dares to repeat the process over and over, seeing nothing but beauty in the speckles that also cover her face, arms, and table. 
• Naima and Evan, together at the clay, mashing the clay with hammers, over and over, and then realizing that, rather than using the tools in the manner intended, it would be much more fun to puncture the clay with tools, creating a 3D sculpture of these; this pursuit unfolds and they laugh out loud at their funny creativity, begging each other to see what the other has done - "Look at this!" 
• Paxton, discovering the table set up for four potential artists but empty of children; he works quietly on one piece, using 'junk' (various wheels, balls, small cars, other) to stamp and press paint onto the paper…still no one else has arrived at the table, so he moves on to create a second painting, and then a third, and then makes his way to the fourth and final, delighted by his find, delighted by this exploration, delighted to have the place to himself.

This is the concentration that I love seeing in preschoolers, a direct challenge to textbook notions of preschoolers having fickle, "less than ten minute" attention spans. 

It is essential that our classrooms provide them with time, possibility, and choice. 

Yes, the art center is becoming a place that echoes my goals for my early childhood classroom. And, the best thing - the sink is right there for them to clean off those messy, creative hands when they decide they want to do something else!

What if we made sculptures that moved?

We had a three-day spring intersession, this past week. Preschoolers through Kindergarteners were divided into mixed age groups to focus on one fun theme for an hour a day. There were so many fun topics for the youngsters - 

Artist’s World – explored famous artists and used various materials to emulate their techniques.

  Cooking = exploring food preparation and measurement, with special recipes of hummus, pizzas, and smoothies.

Healthy Bodies – studying nutrition, exercise, and care of our bodies. International Cooking – cooking from around the world, including Mexico, France, and Spain. Ooey Gooey Science – experimenting with a variety of mixtures to create bouncy balls, snow paint, lava lamps, and magic growing trees made from recycled newspaper.

  Sculptures and Motion – explored wire, recyclables, beads, and found objects to create sculptures that moved.

  Spanish – learning Spanish about the body, exploring through song and dance.

  Worm Composting – explored how worms help break down leftovers and create compost; the children studied the worms and their features and made worm houses.

Can you identify which intersession was mine, based on these brief descriptions? Well, I gave you a hint with my blog title! Yes, my colleague Jenny (Teaching Resident) and I ran an intersession on Sculptures and Motion.  It was an exploratory, process-oriented class...we had some fabulous 12 gauge aluminum wire, lots of recyclables and found objects, and curiosity. A few days before the intersession was to start, Jenny and I discovered a bin of plastic tubes/rods in the midst of all our recyclables, donated by a family earlier in the year [leftovers from some sort of shelving structure that had fallen apart]. We decided that the wire could be used with these rods in all sorts of fanciful ways - we would give each student these materials to begin with, and see what transpired with these as the catalyst. We weren't quite sure what the outcomes would be...the children would guide us. This is my favorite way to teach - let's just work with materials and see what happens!

To "instigate" their work and discovery, we talked to the children about sculptures that moved. We had the children stand as sculptures - and then move and wiggle different body parts, while holding the same pose. Jenny shared a couple of excellent, short videoclips about Alexander Calder's and Jean Tinguely's moving sculptures:

Calder's Circus- this is actually him performing it in the 1950s 

An outdoor Calder sculpture in the wind

Jean Tinguely

The question was posed - could we create sculptures that moved? 

To begin, we had the children explore the wire - bending and moving it into all different shapes and directions. We had the children wear goggles this first day, to encourage them to slow down in their exploration, to use the sharp wire carefully and thoughtfully. They were delighted by this new material. We then asked each child to draw a plan - a blueprint - of their sculpture design. 

Now, it was time to build!

We couldn't work with twenty students at once.  We decided to set up small groups, doing a variety of different things.  While some worked on creating sculptures, others did free-form building in the block corner, creating block sculptures and imagining their wire sculptures. Another small group worked with cardstock and markers, cutting paper gears and decorations to add to their sculptures. 

Lastly, I set up a tree stump with nails (partially hammered into the trunk), for freeform exploration of the wire and pipe cleaners, to channel some additional discovery by students who were using wire for the first time. 

We rotated the children through these areas, allowing each student a good thirty minutes  of sculpture work each of the three days of intersession.

It was fascinating to watch the children create sculptures. Each student was enchanted by the materials, in their own way.

The room was filled with children in motion,

following inner voices,

bending wire,

poking holes in styrofoam,

adding bead after bead to wire strands,

trying to connect the plastic rod to base (pressing, taping, gluing, connecting with wire, or other) 

swinging the wire around and around,

cutting colored tape,

adding cardstock pictures and gears,

coiling the wire around the plastic rod,

lacing ribbon and yarn,

gluing found objects and special gems,

coloring with markers,

wrapping the rod with wire, yarn, tape, or other, 

hammering holes into bottle caps to weave wire through,

rolling and walking the sculpture across the floor, to test its movement,

waving and bending the sculpture, testing its swinging motion, 

making patterns from beads, 

tying on spools and other found objects,

fixing and then undoing, rechecking one's work.

It was not just children the children who were immersed in this work. On the second day of intersession, Jenny and I totally forgot to watch the clock and announce clean up... the next thing we knew, the intersession period was over and my regular "Big Cats" came racing back into the room. What a scramble we had, all of us, putting everything back in its place.

I would love to explore wire sculptures again - for much longer than this three day special program. I've run out of time this school year...but, next year, yes!

There is so much more to discover! 

Here are just a few of the sculptures that the children created -  

Amira's sculpture was so tall, she had to stretch her hands up high and stand on tippy-toes to hold it.

Wilson's sculpture.

Micah's sculpture.

Elyse's sculpture, with blueprint.

Dagmawi's sculpture.

Calla's sculpture and blueprint; she was so proud of how she used spools beneath for sculpture to roll. 

Kayode's sculpture.

Sukey's sculpture.