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Retired, But Still Working

Yes, I'm retired but the real difference is that I'm not being paid anything. In return, I only "work" three days a month. It was the five days a week that killed my interest in teaching the Unicorn class, not a lack of love for the class or for teaching. I was 71 and wanted to sleep in once in a while.

So they asked me to teach a STEM class once a month to the 3 & 4-year old classes, volunteering the time. I jumped at the opportunity, teaching STEM had been one of my specialties the last few years. I've written about starting a dedicated STEM table, a STEM project every day.

This was a little different. I had each class for half an hour, followed immediately by another. That meant no paint or more likely glue because they wouldn't dry in time to go back to class. No multi-day projects as it was a once-a-month class. Not too much cutting as the 3s weren't cutting as well as the 4s I was used to teaching. So I started looking for shorter activities and some demonstrations I could use, preferably on single topics, like air or magnets. After about a year of this, I added the A to STEM and became a STEAM teacher. This meant I now included an art project to, for instance, magnets.

A couple of years later, I added the second teaching assignment, again as a volunteer. I became the schools "Library Lady." I not sure why we call it that. It was done by a real librarian for only the first year. Since then it's been mostly retired teachers from the school and now it's me. But the name stuck and I don't mind.

So, for two days a month I read stories, again a half hour per class. I takes two days because the 2s are now included and the 1-1/2s. I love teaching STEAM but reading whatever stories I want is even more fun. I try to include a couple of books about Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas in the obvious months, some board books or shorter books for the 2s, and love funny books the best.

So to end this post i am including the funniest book, judging by the kids' reaction. It was B.J. Novak's "The Book with No Pictures." You're welcome.

[barbarazab]

Throwing Water

May 3, 2013

We’ve been throwing water again.  We’ve done it for years. 

As I remember, it started one day when I was emptying the water table we had at the time.  (It has long since succumbed to the Arizona sun.) It was smaller than the one we have now, but it was all one piece and, when it was full, it was too heavy to just upend.  So, I had to bail for a while first.  I started, for no particular reason, to toss the water high in the air.  In that moment, water throwing was born.

“Why should I have all the fun?”  The next day, at clean-up time, I took a couple of kids outside to help me bail.  Yup, they had almost as much fun as I’d had.  We had found a new outdoor activity.

  The kids use some small blue (medical) tubs we have.  I encourage them to look at the water in the air.  It seems, for a second, to just hang there.  Then it splits apart into a hundred dazzling diamonds (well, if there’s sun…which there almost always is, here in Phoenix.)

  Of course the kids enjoy experimenting..  Sometimes the tub goes, too.

They also love spinning the water in a circle around themselves.  This year there was a good deal of filling the small tub with water and dumping it on one’s own head.  It was perfect weather for it.  Some kids got really soaked and still, they were dry by the time they went home a couple of hours later.  Perfect!

[barbarazab]

Indoor Land Art

Yes, it’s a bit of an oxymoron.  We began by looking at some books of photographs of the land art of Andy Goldsworthy, but we made our land art indoors because the summer here in Phoenix decided it needed a last hurrah … in late October!  We didn’t quite make it to 100 degrees, but we came close and had to close our outdoor classroom.  Since our tables have a woodgrain top, we covered one with a solid-colored tablecloth to get a less busy background.  Then we put out four picture frames and a collection of sea shells, rocks, twigs, pinecones, leaves, and flowers.  Instructions were minimal.  Here are the results:

Using the shells:

Some minimalist art:

[barbarazab]

A New Building Activity

September 2, 2016

School’s back in session!  Yay!  After a long hot summer, it was definitely time for a long, hot first week of school.  The second is not any cooler, but I’m so excited to be back that I don’t care.  Some things we do the first week or two are old standards, sponge painting our class t-shirts, taking a tour of the school, writing our classroom rules (or at least starting the rules.  It’s an on-going activity.)  This year I’ve decided that I’d like to have a STEM table, almost every day.  We started with some of our less familiar building toys.  (No need to feature the LEGOs.  They are always available, always popular.)  But this building activity was new to me.  I put out a big pile of larger craft sticks and another pile of clothespins, the kind with the spring in them.

There was very little instruction, really just a description of the two parts and a demonstration of attaching a couple of clothespins to a craft stick and setting it on its clothespin legs.  Then they got busy.

The first day, there was a good bit of random building, large shapes, lines of clothespins on a single stick, just some getting used to what they could do with the parts.

The second day specific things started to appear: an airplane and a dinosaur.

After two days of working with the sticks and the clothespins, we decided to keep them in a basket on our building shelves.  They have become a classroom standard!

This has been their introduction to loose parts.  We’ve always had drawers of loose parts for collage work, but these were for tinkering.  Next week we’ll try some tinker trays with more miscellaneous parts in them and even less instruction.  We won’t even have to give them any glue since both glue and tape are already available in the art center.  The only hard part will be deciding each morning which table, art or STEM, needs to be closer to the loose parts drawers and the tools of the art center. I have a feeling it won’t always be the same one.

[barbarazab]

May 22, 2021

I had both girls and a tablet of huge pieces of newsprint I had “rescued” at the Art Resource Center, an amazing place I’ve written about before.  I thought only the first few pages were sketched on, but I was wrong.  The whole tablet had drawings on it.  Well, that’s fine; we’ll just use the backs for --ta! da! -- dancing blottos!

Because the girls had asked to come to my house, their art supplies weren’t here. Fortunately, I have a set of pint bottles of tempera.  Unfortunately, they are in the art desk in the girls’ sleepover bedroom, which is currently PACKED with boxes of stuff from the kitchen and family room to accommodate what is turning into the never-ending kitchen remodel. Fortunately, we were able to snake our way in, push a bookcase a few inches and rescue the paints!  We were ready to begin...

...except for the lovely tarps I used at school.  Oh well, never daunted, we pulled some garden-sized garbage bags from a box outside and got to work.  Each girl dropped some paint on her own paper,  Oddly enough, they had chosen to use the same three colors: red, orange, and yellow.  Not so oddly, their pictures ended up looking somewhat similar.  Anyway, we folded the paper in half and then folded the garbage bags in half around them.

I got out my phone and put on some dance music.  They didn’t need an invitation to begin dancing on their artwork.

You can see some yellow paint on her foot, probably from when she was squirting paint on to the paper.  Oh, well, it’s washable tempera,

And here are the results!

My younger granddaughter’s tore because she had too much paint puddled in the middle.  Too much paint in one spot soaks in and weakens the paper, often resulting in tears, Fortunately when we sent pictures to their Nebraska grandparents, her grandpa said that to him it looked like a giant bird with a black beak,  And it does, if you turn it sideways!  Always trust grandparents for the perfect comment!

[barbarazab]

Land Art

May 17, 2021

It was just me and my younger granddaughter this morning.  Her sister was at school, but preschool, as it always has, ended the week before. The two of us were at my house. looking for things to do besides watch tv (although we did a little of that. too.)  D. wanted to go outside and play, even though there’s not much to do there.  (The backyard is waiting until our year-long kitchen make-over is done.  Sigh!)

Anyway, as we walked out, we came across this:

I asked “Who made this?"   D said her sister had when they were here the other day.  It looked like land art to me, but D passed over it to go digging in a pile of dirt by the back fence.  She stood up and sighed, “This would be better with some water.”  So, of course I got her some water.  She poured some in a hole, enough that it overflowed and ran down the hill.  What surprised me was that she stood up and carefully and with great focus watched the trail of the water appear.  

Then she poured some more water in another hole and watched again.  It was as if she was creating another kind of land art.  Here are the three side-by-side holes she watched, each very different trails, each examined with attention and focus.

Don’t you wonder what she was thinking?  But I knew better than to ask.  I know the answer would have been a brief “Nothing.”  the same “Nothing” she does at preschool every day.

[barbarazab]

Where to Find Ideas for Preschool Science

April 22, 2020

The first step is figuring out what kind of experiments you need.  Some are great for a quick demo, like letting a bottle with some vinegar blow up a balloon for you.  (There’s baking soda in the balloon that falls in when you stand up the balloon which is stretched over the mouth.  Just be ready with several more bottles and balloons, because I can assure you, it will be greeted with cries of “Do it again!!”)

Most of my searches, however, were for simple experiments that the kids could do independently, preferably over and over.  They usually stayed on the science table for a week, so all the kids had the opportunity to try them.

Not everyone has a collection of 50 books of preschool science experiments. Well, actually  I  do. They were collected over 31 years of teaching and I did not pay full price for ANY of them.  As it turns out, they were not my best source of ideas anyway.

Books can help but there’s no reason to pay for any of them.  If you have a decent-sized library in your town, use it!  The trick is to ignore the adult books and head right for the kids’ section. You’re looking for the 507.8 books.  There are more in more specific call numbers (like earth science, chemistry, etc.) but there are lots here. Children’s books have great preschool experiments PLUS the science to explain them written FOR KIDS!!.  Even if you personally can understand the chemistry of why vinegar and baking soda make gas bubbles, the kids won’t.

Don’t be afraid to share your science ideas with other teachers.  Maybe they’ll take the hint and share theirs.  Win-win.

Pinterest wasn’t available when I started teaching but it became invaluable once I discovered it online.  It has a search function, but did you know that you can follow an experiment you like back to the bulletin board it’s on and look through the entire board! You can also “follow” that board and see what’s posted there later.  And be open to changing Pinterest ideas for your age group.  I came across a big blue shoe, filled with children, that was a teacher’s reward chart.(The Little Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe) I kept the shoe idea, drew the kids onto triangles, and turned it into a math project, challenging kids to see how many they could fit on the shoe without overlapping.

Finally, trust your own ideas.  The car and baby experiment in the previous post came from a broken cat ball we had used for painting.  One piece reminded me of a baby car seat’s belts and buckles and the experiment was born. Don’t be afraid to try out your own ideas at home, play with them, change them, and come up with something new. I am confident that you can do it, too!

[barbarazab]

Bouncing Socks

February 23, 2017

Conferences are over, all the art is collected for our upcoming show at a local pizza parlor, and we can get back to teaching.  One of the pieces for the art show was made outdoors, like this:

It starts with a high-sided box with paper in the bottom.  Nearby are four disposable buckets (from ice cream) waiting for the first few painters to pick colors.  Also waiting are four knee socks, one with a baseball-sized ball in it, the others with varying  numbers of small balls.  

So the first artist steps up, picks a paint color, and watches me squeeze some into the chosen bucket. I try to let the students make as many of the decisions as possible, do as much of the project as possible, but a big, empty bucket could hold the entire pint bottle of paint.  Sorry, but I’ll do the squeezing.

Then the artist holds onto the knee-end of the sock, dips the other end into the paint and bounces the ball-laden toe of the sock on the paper.  Over and over.  Then it’s back in the paint or perhaps on to another sock and another color.

In this case, the first artist picked three of the four colors before someone else showed up asking to paint.  Shortly thereafter we had a line of kids waiting and I was wishing for more socks and, most especially, more boxes.  *sigh* Maybe next year.

[barbarazab]

Creativity in STEM

April 28, 2020

When most people think of creativity in schools, their mind turns to the obvious subjects: music, dance, drama, art.  Especially art!

Now, teaching kids facts is important.  When I was little, we were taught the names of the nine planets.  When I grew up, Pluto was demoted.  So much for the “facts”I was taught.  But creativity can never be taken away. I was lucky; I went to school before the age of standardized tests.  There was time for creative writing (English class), producing plays with kids as t the director, the actors,  AND the producer, open-ended questions (science class.)

Well, STEM is a great way to preserve that sort of learning.  Open-ended questions, rather than providing the answers, are an important part of that.  So are open-ended projects. (Not that they don’t have a deadline, it’s just that the kids design their own answers, their own project.)  Let me give you some examples.

My students were four and five years old, so when I asked them to design a bridge to cross a (paper) river, let’s face it, their designs were not exactly revolutionary.  They were, however, all of them, their original designs!  

When we put out twirlers, yes, they were pre-made.  But then the kids had the opportunity to design and make their own.  The younger kids,who weren’t into representational art yet, just scribbled with different colors on each side.  Okay, maybe they learned something about color-mixing.  The older kids had to think what they could divide in two pieces, one on each side ( a tree and its apples, a face and its eyes.)   https://barbarazab.tumblr.com/post/171568794527/twirlers

For math, I came across a project on Pinterest, a big blue shoe and lots of children to go inside.  It was meant to keep track of good behavior and when all the kids were in the house, the class got a reward.  That’s not, however, what I used it for.  I drew the children on triangles and challenged the kids to fit as many kids as they could in the shoe, no overlapping, no hanging over the edge!  The winner that year was the one girl who figured out she could fit more in if she turned half the triangles upside down.  Yay, Maddie!

Yay, STEM!

[barbarazab]

Like Always, Only Different

April 4, 2015

Most years we cover a balloon with glue-soaked yarn, let it dry, and pop it.  This year I was looking at a basket full of paper my class had shredded with a hand-crank shredder and decided to see if there was any difference.

I hung the balloon over the table and described the process to the class.  There most definitely were differences! The paper was stiffer and therefore harder to run through the bowl of watered-down glue.  It was also harder to stick to the balloon, especially on the bottom half because the strips were shorter than the yarn we normally used.  

But we persevered and got a good deal of paper, at least on the top half of the balloon.  We put it out in the hall, hanging from a hook in the ceiling, because we needed the table for snack time.

Unfortunately one of our boys was playing with the balloon after class and it popped.  The next morning we hung it in one of our windows and started another one.  It took two days and I had to help a bit, especially getting the paper on the bottom half of the balloon.  Then they could stick their paper to mine.  

The next morning, after it was dry, we voted on what would happen when we popped it.  Would the paper pull away from the balloon, retaining its round shape?  Or would the paper collapse with the rapidly shrinking balloon, as most of the kids thought? Well, neither, exactly.  They were right; the balloon collapsed.  But the glued paper held the hole wide open!

You can see its edge in the photo above.  Look below the horizontal lavender in the middle and immediately to the right of the little white piece sticking up below it.  Then some of the glue gave way and some of the paper popped back out.  It was, I thought, way cool.  (The kids were less impressed.)

The next day we went back to using yarn, just so the kids could see the differences.  It’s drying over the weekend and we’ll pop it on Monday. Everyone, cover your ears!

[barbarazab]

We Got Mail!

April 24, 2016

At circle the other day I showed the kids this envelope and explained that we had received some mail.

This is the letter that was inside.

Along with the letter were two identical piles of shapes cut from construction paper.  Asking for volunteers, we put together two teams to construct pictures of Gorp from Glintor.  Gorp had given them only one hint, that his head was pink.  (Well, actually, I guess that’s two hints: that he has a head and that it’s pink.)

I suggested they not glue anything down at first, that they arrange all the pieces until they were satisfied and THEN glue them down.  One team took my suggestion to heart.

One team didn’t and spent a good deal of time carefully pulling pieces away from the background.

They both learned something.

It’s interesting that the long pieces became legs in both efforts and some of the black circles eyes. In both cases, the brown piece became hair.  (At least, that’s what I’m guessing from my anthropomorphic perspective.)  Both teams however got past the temptation to make a human and use the extra pieces just for decoration.

Gorp came back over night and left them another letter on his way home.

The results are now on our hallway bulletin board for their parents to enjoy.  All good teaching is based on plagarism, so thanks go to Tom Hobson for the idea.

[barbarazab]

On Their Own

April 18, 2016

We have activities in preschool, planned out (sometimes months in advance, although in my case, it’s more like the weekend before) and chosen for both their attractiveness and their learning potential.  Most of them are popular, although once in a while a particular activity will fall flat with a particular class.  Today we had activities like this:

And this:

But at least half of their free play time is taken up with activities they’ve created themselves with whatever comes to hand.  For instance, after finishing the art project, some of them stayed making their own art.

And some of them, still using the same table, folded fans.  One girl knew how to fold back and forth and showed another girl.  (Oddly enough, these are the same two girls that remembered how to fold paper airplanes.)

These three created a game that involved hiding (?) small bowls, in this case, in a sculpture on a bulletin board.  (We’ve had the sculpture for several years.  We’ve stopped adding to it because it’s so full.  If I could find another cardboard inset piece that size, it would come down and we’d start all over again.)

Of all of these self-directed activities, this had to be my favorite.  I could have watched it forever.  One boy was lying down and pretending to be asleep.  Several other kids started putting small plastic toys on him, oh so carefully, as if he really WERE asleep.

They hid things in his  hands.

  He was so good, never peeking at them, never moving.  If I didn’t know the boy, he might have fooled me.  Slowly the pieces got bigger.  He still didn’t move.  

After about fifteen minutes, he opened his eyes and smiled at them to let them know that he was “in” on the game, too.

[barbarazab]

Painting with Funnels

February 25, 2017

We were going to paint with funnels the other day, nothing unusual.  I quickly had three or four kids around the table.  Because their fingers were plugging the bottom of the funnel, I squeezed out the paint myself.  It was thick, too thick to flow out in gracefully arcing lines.  It fell in blobs on the paper.  

Now that was not uninteresting but the pictures would have ended up looking very similar.  Or I could have poured the paint into cups and thinned it out a bit with water.  But I had kids waiting.  So I grabbed some skewers that were close at hand and suggested they run the tips through the blobs of paint.

For some of them, this was more interesting than the funnels, as if the funnels were just part of the set-up.  In fact, some of the artists worked so assiduously in one area or another that we ended up with “preschool brown,” the color you get when kids enjoy the project so much, they keep painting until all the paint loses its individual colors and mixes into brown.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve bitten back the words “Stop NOW; it’s beautiful!”  Bitten back because, you see, it IS the process, not the product.

[barbarazab]

Nuts and Bolts

April 14, 2017

This is a very simple small motor exercise (but, really, aren’t most of them?)  Several years ago I bought a collection of various sizes of nuts and bolts.  Each bolt has one, and only one, nut that fits it.  We used it for a couple of years and then I misplaced the peanut butter jar that they were stored in.  I recently was cleaning the shelving units on my patio and—what do you know!—I found them. So I put them out scattered on the table.

You’ll note that the nuts and bolts weren’t matched up at all.  The kids were challenged to find the nut for whichever bolt they were holding, screw it on, and go on to another bolt.

When they were all matched up and screwed on, the kids were asked to twist the nuts off, mix them up, and leave the activity for others.

  Now that’s just courtesy, leaving the activity ready for the next student.  However, it also doubles the amount of screwing each child does. And that’s the whole idea of small motor exercise, isn’t it?

[barbarazab]

Another Use for Colored Clay

February  16, 2021

I was babysitting today and, once my older granddaughter was done with online school, I asked them to help with a project of mine.  I first saw this technique when MaryAnn Kohl and I were working on a book together, Action Art.  It was new to me then (thanks, MaryAnn!) but a real favorite now.

It involves taking a small pinch of clay or playdough and smooshing it, pulling it with your thumb or pointer finger, along the paper.

The older one made a picture of something:

But she also enjoyed the process of smooshing.  As she was working, she confided to me that her art teacher had a picture of hers on display in her room because “she says I’m so creative.”  Yes, she is, although she’s in a representational phase right now, partly her age (almost seven) and partly her status as first-born.

Her sister (aged 5) just wanted to experience the playdough smooshing under her fingers.

But she got creative, too, with the technique.  She rolled a ball of several colors and smooshed that.

Either way, representational art or pure process art, learning lots of techniques is good for kids...just like reading lots of books or making lots of friends!

[barbarazab]

My Brilliant Granddaughter

February 10, 2021

Okay, like all grandparents I think my granddaughters are brilliant.  I taught preschool for 31 years and saw many really bright, charming, BRILLIANT kids.  My granddaughters don’t have a monopoly on brilliance.  But they’re MY granddaughters, they have my heart, and so, of course, they are brilliant in every way,

.I am now babysitting them two days a week, so I’ll be back to posting about anything they do I think you’ll find interesting or instructive.  Today’s post may be neither but I can’t help myself.  

Their dad is reading Through the Looking Glass to them at night after finishing Alice in Wonderland.  D, the younger granddaughter, has set up a tea party in their playroom and has parties wearing an Alice costume (a blue dress of hers and a pinafore I made for their mother’s Halloween costume the year she was four.)

The older one L, was writing with chalk on the driveway, when she asked me how to spell “tail, actually which word to use.  I went over to look and discovered she was writing out this poem from Lewis Carroll:

She asked about a couple of words but most she just used invented spelling if she wasn’t sure.  She’s six, but about two weeks away from seven.

She finished the poem from memory and asked to make a video.  Then she took off on her scooter (you can tell that she’s ready) reciting this poem over and over, with a lot more fluency than she reads it for the camera.  I wonder if the pauses came from reading her own writing and wondering if various words were spelled correctly.

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipNNHK8UZ4_aWEzofO7VOCkUH5mzo-Zt7QAPCfCz

See? Brilliant!

[barbarazab]

The Joys of Serendipity

July 6, 2017

There’s no school in the summer but I have a post about something we did at the end of the school year that I’ve been meaning to share.

One of our other classes needed a new table and the director ordered a big semi-circular one.  I happened to be around the afternoon they opened the box and my eyes immediately lit on something I wanted.  Not the table.  Although it’s absolutely beautiful (with purple legs!), I don’t have any spare floor space for it.

However, lying around the table, keeping it protected during shipping, was a large circular strip of corrugated cardboard.  I claimed it then and there!   (As it turned out, I also got some large, crumbled up pieces of brown paper and the box itself.  They’re another story.)

My class, when they saw it, wanted to paint it and glue things on it.  I had to veto the beads and glitter for reasons that will become obvious later, but happily put it out for them to paint.  The large circle has corrugation on one side and loosely-attached plastic on the other.  I didn’t think plain tempera would stick to the plastic so I suggested that they concentrate on the corrugated side.  (As it turned out, the paint that got on the plastic DID stick, but the year was ending and there was no time to paint the other side.)

I had to move the circle, which was coiled on the table, several times to expose more of the very large corrugation, much bigger than your average, everyday corrugation.  We dried it overnight and then came the exciting part.

I tied four or five pieces of yarn to the cardboard circle and hung it from hooks in the ceiling panels in the hallway right outside our room  (hence no beads to drop on people’s heads!)  It dips and swoops like a giant rollercoaster!  The kids loved it!  The directors loved it!  I loved it! All the adults who came down our hallway loved it!

Next year we’ll take it down and paint it again.  And for years to come!  And every time we hang it back up it will look different!  It will BE different…endlessly!