Snap Painting

It's all over the preschool teacher blogosphere. Small medium and large size snap painting. I knew we would do it, was just waiting for the right moment, and the right materials.

Finally a pair of perfect sized baking pans arrive on the scene. Deep enough to contain some of the mess and the perfect width to fit the rubber bands I had on hand. The children played them like delicate instruments, looking positively serious in safety goggles and smocks. Snapping away as colors splattered the page in intricate design. Some not content with just snapping moved the bands to make way for fingerpainting, then snapped some more over the swirly mess.

I'm pretty sure we'll be snapping again this school year.

Slime

Give a child some homemade slime and some time and they may make something remarkable like this.

Stir Some Slime

~

Taken Apart Tape Machine

This is the sort of little surprise a teacher loves to find...

Cassettes!

Mom and Dad dumped a paper bag full of fifty or so old cassette tapes on me that they no longer wanted stored in their garage. Four track recordings made in high school that cause one to cringe. Tapes by some boring band from somewhere that will never be listened to. Broken tapes. Mc Hammer tapes. Whatever.

Took them to school and made them part of the curriculum. We pulled as much tape out of about 20 of them as we could in a few hours. Cut it up with scissors. Wound it around cardboard cones. Ripped it up. Listening to tapes while we did it. Music from Cambodia and Peru. Making tape wigs to wear on our heads. Paint gluing the clear cases. Busting open a broken tape machine. Pulling out some speakers, then a motor. Covering the insides with glitter glue and bits of colored somethings.

In a way it was selfish of me, sacrificing a part of my past like that in some strange ritual. Those old embarrassing recordings, now just a prop in the play of a child, never to be listened to again.

It's Nothing

•