Toddler’s in the kitchen!

Drawing, cooking and fun in Ward Hobbs

What a wonderful week in the Ward Hobbs classroom! Absolutely wonderful. Here’s a glimpse :

Observational Drawing:

Beets grown in our garden formed the inspiration for this week’s observational drawing. 

Observational Drawing helps us to slow down and really observe the subject.  Look at the detailed drawings. Need I say more?

We had so much fun with first round of beet drawings that  decided to pick another one. We were astonished by its size!

Which inspired even more drawing!

To further celebrate nature’s bounty I harvested apples from my home tree and BJ collected crab apples from the trees in the front of the school and together we made apple butter with the children!

The recipe is simple: lots of apples, sugar to taste, cinnamon, cloves, lemon juice, a dash of salt and some water. Cook long and slow in the crock pot, whisk it smooth and serve! Yum!!!

Dramatic Play:

We brought in some wonderful wooden airports with ramps and pulleys for the children of Ward Hobbs to use.Thier travel play is a joy to watch and their conversations are connecting nicely with the classrooms geography materials.  (Notes on play at home…Encourage your child to enjoy play for its own sake. They needn’t look to you for affirmation about the joy of an activity. Play, by definition, is a reward in and of itself. Redirect them back to their own joyful barometer whenever possible with observations rather than praise… “I see you have lined up all your cars. That took a lot  of work. How do YOU feel about that?” .)

What do you do when there’s no people to populate your airport? Make your own!!! (Hint: that’s why I removed the people😉)

XP Corner:

To extend the XP story writing project, the children and I thought about what matters most to them before using the language of drawing to communicate our ideas on paper. Our observational drawings earlier in the week helped us to slow down and really focus on communicating, in line and color, what we love. Here are a few examples:

Stay tuned next week to see what else we get up to!

The meaning of rescue

With all the dramatic play going on I have lots of opportunities to observe the important role that challenges and conflict play in a good story.  These three children were busy rescuing other characters and dolls in the studio.  I asked them what it meant to rescue and here was their answer:

Angelina What does rescue mean?

W                  Rescue means saving someone who is in trouble or something.  It feels like our rescue hands are helping when we rescue.

K We’re rescuing Julietta (Paige’s nanny) because her car got broken and we have to rescue.

W Rescue helps things turn out different. We are rescuers! (Obviously proud)

N So the person rescuing is helping the person who needs rescuing.
K Yea.
(All three of them smiled broadly at me before returning to their rescue.)

A beautiful reminder of the value of dramatic play and overcoming obstacle in the development of confidence and self esteem.

Tension in storytelling

Several years ago, in the studio, children began to explore good guy and bad guy play.  At the time I was very uncomfortable with battle play in general and even more so in the studio. Thankfully the children were such patient teachers.  They taught me the importance of making space for children to wrestle with big issues through play, including issues of conflict and duality.  This week the children reminded me how important tension is in the arc of a story telling. This time the source of that tension wasn't a bad guy but TIME and the urgency of travel.  These three children crafted an elaborate story while working to overcome the challenges of air travel.  Here is a sampling of their words:

D. In our world everyone is a worker.  Got it? Everyone is a worker!

W. Yea workers.  Let’s go to Chicago.

D. Workers get out here! (gathering people) We’re all workers right?  HURRY. we've gotta go or we’re gonna run out of time.

W. No these are the people who are going to Chicago, they aren’t the workers?

D. Okay.  Are these the workers?

W. Yes.

D. Okay we all need to hurry or we’re gonna run out of time!

W Okay HURRY.

VROOOOOOMMMM

The energy was hurried and frantic... they were clearly battling the hands of time.