You Know The Ancient Rhyme

You already know about
Jazz going with winter
The steam of an eerie night
The liquid tail of an eel

You have probably heard
The one about the little kitty
Who catches the mousey
Only to lose it again

A free life means
Free on the inside
Free to change willingly
Into anything instantly

You know the poetry
Of pure purposeless play
And so know that this poem
Belongs in the compost

You know the ancient rhyme
For 'twas you who first wrote it
With the ink of octopus on the back
Of a giant sea turtle.

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

•

Oktober

Cardinal at the window feeder
Two days of steady rain
Moving the plants that can't
Handle the frost indoors

Seeing you in a half dream
Wearing a made up face
With music behind you
From the island of Crete

You are always bearing living gifts
That the people turn down
They would rather drape themselves
In the corpse flesh of culture

You with your star eyes focused
Can achieve the inconceivable
Like lifting hot heavy stones
With the wind of your breath

You are a living verb while
They are noun-things in a herd
You are slow to come and
Slow to go while they hurry hurry

This evening cold and damp
Daring you to come out
Rain keeps quitting then starting
Again while cardinal feeds un-phased.

My New Teaching Strategy

If I find myself automatically rejecting a child's way of using certain materials because it doesn't fit with my agenda for the day, then I make myself figure out a way to turn whatever the child was doing into one of tomorrow's activities.

Markings

A relic unclaimed, no name

Left on the art table today

Blob of white glue and something

Looking like the iris of an eye

Black marker scratchings, cut up

Orange paper pieces placed but not

Pasted on the red rectangular page

The remains of a free form session

With scissors and creation like

The shed skin of a snake or

Wind markings in sand dunes.