Wonder love

2011 Top Ten

Well, I really did try to choose just 10 images of 2011 moments that would capture it's spirit. Offer a nod of gratitude. Leave a trace. But that inspired a different way of thinking about it. It's really about reflecting on this year's top 10 treasured values that are always the lens and frame of an image I shoot and collect. Those that are favorites at the end of a year all got to be on that list because they snapped those values to life in the first place. My eye seeks what my heart wants to know and remember. 

Here are the things my heart wanted to know and remember this year:

1) Such amazing tiny hands and feet

2) Sustained curiosity

3) Surprise and Delight

4) Beauty

5) Testing limits

6) Early Literacy

7) Togetherness

8) Exploration

9) Making use of inspiration

10) Play

Oh, what a good way that was not to have to choose 10! If you were to try and choose your own -- whether from family, travel, classroom, where ever 2011 may have taken you and your camera -- what would they show you you cared most about?

Here's to a happy, healthy, playful 2012!

A peek into Opal School

There is, actually, an official Opal School blog. Someday soon I hope to make it public -- but for now, I have to settle for sharing a post here and there, slurped from that blog over to this one -- just to give you a peek into the incredible work those children and teachers do together. This one is from our classroom of 8 - 10 year olds and their new teacher, Avery Hill. (Her blog is a public one: http://rootedingrowth.blogspot.com/.) It is Avery's first year teaching at Opal School and her first year teaching. She spent last year as Opal's apprentice teacher, studying the ways we work together. And this year she is supported by a part time mentor teacher, an experienced Opal teacher -- later referred to as MG.

In this classroom, as they were getting to know one another this year, some tinkering workshops gave way to some interest in bridges, and the metaphors spilled over as ways to describe and think about the learning community. The concrete bridge images provided tangible, visible, playful opportunities to hold the concept of community. And so what follows makes perfect, if magical, sense. And they are a starting place for the rest that will unfold over the year.

Post by Avery Hill:

Opal 3's work to compose and adopt agreements for our community has continued these past weeks. After brainstorming and refining, the children came to agreement on five ideas to guide the way we will strive to be together this school year. But it felt strange to call them "agreements" after all the discussion about and comparison of our community as a kind of bridge that we are building. How could we envision our agreements in the context of our work with bridges?

The children wrote this letter to our friend, occasional special guest, and founder of Opal School Judy Graves, to tell her about the work we had done:

Dear Judy,

We expect you know about the Opal agreements.  Well, they just took a trip to the trash can and they’re NOT coming back.  So, say goodbye!  We replaced them with guiding pillars… big GINORMOUS guiding pillars. 

Between the time when you last visited us and now, we came up with these guiding pillars.  When we were done with our bridge work with Steve, we started thinking about our community as a bridge.  The pillars are our agreements that guide us.  Our guiding pillars are:

·        Be safe.

·        Respect everyone.

·        Support everyone in our community.

·        Treat materials and surroundings like treasures.

·        Think before acting.

MG had an idea to create the pillars in the classroom.  So on the playground side of the classroom you can see five painted pillars that represent our guiding pillars. 

We’re using our guiding pillars to help us figure out what role we play in our community. 

We want to share this with you and hear the end of your story tomorrow.

Love,

Opal 3

   

  

    

    

    

As we continue working and learning together in the New Year, these pillars will provide constant guidance to our thinking and acting. Certainly, they will inspire questions and continue to spark our thinking about what it means to be a community together this school year.

Wishing everyone a lovely and restful Winter Break - see you in 2012!

 

 

No homework

I was just finishing an article for Opal School's newsletter about the wonder of learning. I looked up from my work to see Max and his dad fully engaged in the collaborative creation of a new comic strip series. Character development. Plot lines. Dialogue. The need to spell Vanquish just right. The illustrations. The incredible detail.

I am so glad Max didn't have any homework tonight. 

Thanks

As I was driving today my eye caught the briefest glimpse of a bird poking around in the yellow leaves piled at the edge of the road. And I wondered just for the briefest second about how many birds there might be under those leaves, poking around for bugs and worms -- at tremendous risk of being run down by speeding tires, any of the hundreds whizzing past. And yet there they were. A quick shift of focus and there they were.

Sophie's class took a field trip to the city's waste water treatment facility today. It was a sensory experience that will remain ripe in her imagination, invisible to most of us. Maybe happily so. But it made me think, for another brief moment, about on how much we rely that we don't see. There is a magic in that shift in focus.

I woke up so tired today. There is a new personality to attend to in this household:

Her name is Lucy.

When Stella woke up with a sore throat and wanting to stay home, it was easy to say yes. But I had a headache and I had a meeting that couldn't be missed, and Sophie and Max still had to go to school, and oh! the driving! I am sure I drove the equivalent of a trip to Idaho and back today. And the rain. A mudpit of a backyard and a puppy. oh! the laundry! and the mopping...does muddy laundry water count as waste water? I kind of hope so.

Those little birds just refused to stay out of sight to me today, though. I'm not sure why. It may have been the confidence I picked up in the few paragraphs I read of Madeline Levine's The Price of Privilege -- where she assured me that being a working mother wasn't damaging my children. Or this quote I'd read, quite early in the morning, from Edith Cobb's The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood:

...wonder permits a response of the nervous system to the universe that incites the mind to organize novelty of pattern and form out of incoming information.

And so it was the absurdity of Max and Sophie pretending to be my sister's dogs invited by Stella to the family tea party that made me laugh. And the fact that they played their parts for her with mostly straight faces and cooperative barks.

And it was Stella's determination to prepare and clean the lettuce for dinner's salad that made me so proud. And the fact that she noticed how much everyone enjoyed eating it.

And it was Max's enthusiasm for sharing his careful work putting together and painting his tiny army guy models and watching him lost in his play with them not long after that filled me with love and awe for this big little boy. 

And it was reading picture books with three children crowded so close we could barely breathe to read and Stella giving voice to the silly parts while Bob and I reached for each other with our toes that I felt so happy. 

And it was Sophie's face, crushed with disappointment over having halved all but the milk in the soup recipe she made for dinner and her relief in finding that it tasted delicious anyway that made me feel thankful.

Thankful that all those little birds are there to find in every moment. Thankful for my own sweet little birds and their dad and those that came before us. Thankful that I can choose the form that I make of the incoming information I encounter in any moment. Thankful for all these moments.

And those to come. Always at risk of being run over by the speeding tires that can't perceive them. But there nonetheless. Visible to me when I choose to see.

Faces for Six Pumpkins

It is a good idea, it turns out, to plan the faces for your extra pumpkins while you are waiting patiently for the seeds... those endless seeds all tangled up in orange goo... to find their way out of the way of the carving knife.

I began my day having stumbled upon this lovely post over on Let's Explore. It caused me to stop and wonder about the way I would choose to take my time on this precious sunny Saturday. What agenda was I harboring? How much space did I have to follow the desires of my children? How open was I going to be to listening? 

Stella and I had our first fallout of the day over Shrinky-Dinks. It was a classic breakdown between adult and young child trying to negotiate the constraints of a craft kit. In the realm of consciousness it was a battle between her lantern and my spotlight. She could see more possibilities than I could and I didn't want her to get burned on hot cookie sheet or melted plastic. She soon tired of me being so uptight and went to find someone or something to do that was more interesting.

By 9 am, we knew that it would be pumpkin patch day. It was this day or not at all, of course, this close to Halloween. 11-year-old Max, having heard that there are corn mazes around town in which you can be chased by people holding real chain saws, thought the G-rated version where we had arrived was lame. But after being convinced that visiting an actual scary maze was not something we were going to follow his lead on, he grabbed Stella's hand and they enjoyed themselves anyway.

I was really terrible with the pumpkins. Why is it that the pumpkins are all already picked, lying around in the muddy field? Why is it that they cost the same, those muddy pumpkins in the muddy field, and the clean ones in the bins at the farm stand? There was just no romance in it for me today-- the pumpkins in the mud. Stella wanted to pick one from the field and the good news, I guess, is that we let her. I do wish that having gone through all that mud, though, she would have at least had some sense of how those pumpkins actually grow. When did picking pumpkins come to mean only selecting?

She found a few she liked. 

And we took them home.

The annual ritual of the carving, the seed toasting, the face-making was something we all could gather around together. It's Stella's fourth time now, and she knows how to play. Finally there was a lead she could take that we all could contentedly follow. She brought the pumpkins to life.

And I will be thinking some more tomorrow about how much I lead, how much I follow, how much I whine, and working on developing a deeper sensitivity for the moments when we are really connected and together. 

Time

I happened upon a few old pictures today. This one just slayed me:

The snaggle-toothed seven-year old Sophie. And this one:

Such sweetness and little wide-eyed faces. I miss those babies. I can't help it. And it's not because now they tell me so bluntly that I talk too much and my taste in music is bad. And it's not that their taste in music is bad or even the fact that they organize their limited weekly screen time around opportunities to watch The Simpsons. It's just that this time goes by too damn fast.

In small snippets I am reading Amanda Soule's new book about the Rhythm of Family. Luckily it's formatted that way -- and whether that's because she's a blog writer or because she knows that no matter how much we talk about slowing down and living deeply in every moment, we still only have the here and there kind of time to think about anything else -- I'll never know. But she's put the passing of time heavily on my mind this week. 

Soule writes about the dreamy moments of baking with a child while a littler one zooms through the kitchen on his wooden trike and an older one threatens to run through the house before removing muddy soccer cleats. And those moments full of noisy love resonate with such meaning I begin to fear the day they end. Worse, I fear the other kind of noise in the house. The kind that is full of discord and unhappiness. Slammed doors. Eye-rolls. I fear that time squeezing out the other. In real time, but maybe in memory, too. What do we make of this time we have? 

While orthodontists unsnaggle teeth and dermatologists prescribe potions to keep faces sweet, wonder shifts to who we are together-- bigger, older, and still together. Trying not to grieve the moments gone, but to be here with them now in all the days we have. 

I sat on the floor today with Stella, painting with shades of gray.

While Sophie and Bob cooked dinner together.

And Max played with a friend.

It was that kind of dreamy. I felt all the beauty and the warmth and the slowness of the moment. And I asked Stella what the paint made her think of. Did she think of a story? A feeling? Stella, does it remind you of anything? And without the slightest hint of silliness while she kept on painting she said, emphatically,

Bird poop. 

She was right. Time marches on.

Before furnishing

Tonight is the school picnic!

Stella: You mean it's tomorrow now?

Yes.

Stella: Oh! So that means that M is going to be at school!

Yes she is!

Stella: Every single tomorrow M is going to be in my class. But not every single today!

What's a 4 year old to do with concepts contained in words like today and tomorrow? How is Stella supposed to make sense of the fact that her dear friend, M, was not in school on the first day she arrived this year? Clearly, she will work at it until she has a theory that can suffice to explain it all.

Isn't this just what we all do-- no matter how old we are?

I am reading Alison Gopnik's beautiful book, The Philosophical Baby right now. Devouring it is more apt. In it, she ties childhood and adulthood together. She argues the importance of childhood to adulthood, but also the parallels of process and reason. For example, children create wild pretend scenarios using elements of everything and anything they have discovered and encountered so that they can make sense of it, mix it up, and understand it even more. Adults create and consume fiction for the same reasons. How many of us have developed an understanding of some element of the human condition with more depth and empathy through fiction than through any other means? The differences between childhood and adulthood amount to experience, responsibility, and perceptions of reality.

Our young selves get to freely explore both this world, and all the possible...worlds, without worrying about which of those worlds will actually turn out to be inhabitable. We adults are the ones who have to figure out whether we want to move into one of those possible worlds, and how to drag all our furniture in there too.

Alison Gopnik

So what kind of elements of possiblity do we want to provide children with, so they have as much practice as possible with developing worlds before furniture begins to accumulate and need storage space? 

Family Dinner

Sophie (she's 14 now!) had me call her when I was just a very precise number of blocks from home last night so she could time the slicing of these peaches just so. So when they arrived on the table, they would be still glistening and bright yellow. So enticing that Stella (she's 4 now!) just couldn't wait a moment to dive in.

We have been enjoying the beginnings of a little friendly competition over here. It is a family dinner competition that, as you can see, only a couple of weeks in, has inspired the best. 

And I think it may inspire the energy in my voice, ready to do some writing again. 

More on the dinners... and the family that makes them, to come...

The Power of Oops

"I punch-ded Ruby today. It was an accident - ly. But it was an oopsie moment. I had an oopsie moment. Acause in my classroom we don't punch. We had to solve the problem. So I had to sit on the bench and my brain did something magical. I just thought 'there can be two mommies!' It just popped right in my brain. And everything just snapped together."

Stella, 4.1 years

This is the story I got to hear after school today, as Stella and I took a walk to the park. Her teacher had told me a little bit of what had happened and so when I asked Stella about it, this all tumbled out. A proud storyteller, all puffed up with her accomplishment. Beaming.

I had to laugh a little as I tried to imagine or remember how my own old stories of punching my friends in preschool might have gone.  I don't, in fact, have any memories I can trace to preschool. But if the trouble I got into for slugging my little sister is any indication, I think it's safe to say that no one ever helped me to see my actions as "oopsies". Or helped me to understand that my brain had the capacity to "magic" another way.

What a gift to learn to see these mistakes as opportunities. To develop the confidence to know you can think of another way. To learn that you are responsible to do so.

Ellen Galinsky published this article in the Huffington Post today. It was written in response to this article published in the New York Times several days ago. As Galinsky points out, we've got the debate all wrong. We need a new framing of what could be, grounded in possibilities like those that Opal School preschoolers make visible every day. And as adults, we could stand to trust that our brains might have "magical" capacities as well. 

 

Summer Symposium (already)

We're gearing up for Opal School's 11th annual summer symposium and my anxiety is keeping me busy. This year, Lella Gandini will be with us for 3 days along with a group from Ochoa elementary school in Tucson, AZ. It will be a great opportunity to reflect on this journey of creating a Reggio Inspired school from a variety of perspectives. Local guest presenters from Rowanberry School and Mentor Graphics will be with us as well. 

If you haven't signed up yet, the seats are going really fast! Especially this week, I suppose, because the early bird registration discount ends on Friday.

Here's the link for registration.

We're also getting ready to release a few new publications -- one about story workshop that includes a DVD! Keep checking here for updates...

Hope to see you at symposium!