Three’s Class Project

 

It’s Silent Auction time at Piedmont Progressive Preschool. That means that the teachers need to come up with a suitable art project for the class to work on that can be sold at the silent auction. Suitable means within our philosophy. But, boy, that’s hard.

Why? We don’t do directed art projects. We set out the materials and let the kids have at it. What happens, happens.  We tell them that they are the boss of their art. They decide when it’s done, how it’s done, etc. And if they want to throw it in the trash, that’s fine with us. 

Well, it sure was hard to step back and let ‘em go. We, the teachers, wanted to step in and stop them before the kids decided they were done. 

The project? A large art canvas divided into squares. Each kiddo chose a square and got to feather paint with the primary colors. Sounds pretty, huh?

First kid….swiped some blue. “I’m finished,” he declares and marches back into the classroom. Okaaay. We can handle that. Looks good.

“Look teacher, I’m making purple,” another says as he’s mixing paint with two feathers. Totally filled the square but created some fantastic texture with the feathers.

Little P. created some beautiful rainbow smears, but then didn’t want to stop, even with some rather rabid encouragement from moi and my co-teacher, and a delightful moosh of brown developed in spots. Some of the rainbows survived. We taught our artiste well and she resisted all of our efforts to stop when WE wanted her too and her square is delightful.

The final product looks beautiful. It really does. We grownups struggled with the definition of what was beautiful and who should define it. We struggled with creating something “saleable” for the silent auction while still not defining what was “art” to the munchkins. I think we all did OK. What do you think?

OK…so I can’t get the picture to load. I’ll mess with it AFTER the Silent Auction. Right now, I’m off to party. Toodles.

It’s been a struggle lately….

It’s been a struggle lately. Struggle to blog, to write, to get up for work, just to function even. I’m not sure what’s going on. I even spent most of yesterday on the couch watching TV, simply for lack of energy to do anything else. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy it since all I could focus on was what I wanted to be doing (editing, writing,laundry,and not watching TV) instead of what I was doing. My brain wouldn’t shut down and I couldn’t even nap. After picking kiddo up from school and a short visit to the park, I did manage to clean the kitchen and the two fish tanks.

Thankfully, we’re both on Spring Break now. The drive to and from kiddo’s school is really becoming a grind, especially coupled on the three days a week when I have to rush back to this part of town to work at the preschool.

My little friends have been a grind as well. We had a great day on Wednesday, but those days have far and few in between. Who knew that these three-year olds could wear us out so much? *polishes halo*

I had a great brainstorm during the drive home for a new blog, about the preschool and parenting, and figured out how to lay it out and came up with four blog posts from this past week alone! Yikes! Will my brain ever shut down???? I can’t do it though, at least not yet, not until I hear if I get the teaching assistant job I’ve applied for. So yesterday I was pretty frustrated with the morning going the way it did, so unproductive, and the afternoon drive becoming too productive and overwhelming.

For now, I’ve decided to just incorporate those blog posts into this site. Why not? It’s been such a struggle getting this up and running, I can’t be adding another project.

I ordered a Quick Pad from e-bay and it should be arriving this week. I love those things. (I had one a few years ago that died after being dropped one too many times.) It will help me with my writing productivity. My internal editor shuts off! It’s so easy to carry around and do two minutes here and there and have multiple items going at once.

Feels good to actually write…