The sky's the limit

As you may have heard, there is a wooden airport, complete with luggage, conveyer belts, planes and people in the studio. It has been a huge hit! I observed the children at play for a few weeks and noticed that the play wasn't moving beyond story telling and interacting with the materials in a fairly prescribed way.  This gave me pause and inspired Bekke and I to have a conversation.  We wondered how we might encourage the children to move beyond the elements included in the airport work.  After some thinking we decided that perhaps we'd given the children too many pre-made materials with which to play.  So we took some of the pre-made parts away and brought in some open ended wooden and recycled materials to extend their thinking.  I placed these materials on a shelf near the airport work and voila', without any effort on my part, handmade airplanes became the THING!  Now, the studio is fast becoming a factory or sorts and not just of airplanes, children are now making birds and other three-dimensional creations with which to play.  

This child spent an afternoon creating a large painting of a cloudy sky.  Her artwork inspired conversations about flight and wind and liftoff.  It also provided a beautiful backdrop for some of their creations.

In an effort to support this study, I'm scouring my house for recycled and repurposed materials to use in the studio.  If you are inspired to help, I'd love it if you could do the same.

And when you do, just drop them by the studio and you'll get to see some of the children's creations suspended from the ceiling.