Project learning: Peter and the Wolf

Thank goodness I work in a center that values children's inherent passion for and interest in learning through the arts! Where would I be if I didn't? I would be creating lessons to make seasonal crafts each month, Jack-O-Lanterns in October, Turkeys in November, Christmas trees and Menorahs in December.  Instead we watched the opera Hansel and Gretel in December, and began a unit on music and sound exploration after Christmas that is still going strong.

We began with exploration of sounds, including jars of varying amounts of water that the children tapped to hear similarities and differences in pitch and timbre. Musical instruments were mixed with boxes, Boomwackers, and paper plates on an exploration table. My teaching partner brought in real band instruments for the children to try, and my director brought her collection of world instruments and made a presentation. Parents and siblings came to share their own instrumental talents. I contacted the local high school band director and asked if we could bring sixteen four/five year olds to observe a band rehearsal. Soon we were walking to the high school with parent helpers, and watching a musical education program created just for us! The children were enraptured. They already knew so much, and displayed their knowledge when asked questions by the band director. This experience helped the children own and consolidate their new knowledge, which led to the next phase: Peter and the Wolf.

While I had some misgivings about the length of the piece, the children scuttled those quickly. Listening to the story, moving to the music, they were fully present to the work. They created simple headbands that served as costume designations and began spontaneously rehearsing this half-hour drama every morning before morning meeting, during activity time. All I had to do was put on the CD. There were arguments about blocking and characterization, and settling of differences through more rehearsal. My partner and I knew then that we had a "hit" and went further with the children. We planned a staged version of Peter and the Wolf to perform for the younger children, the threes and fours.

I can't say that everything went smoothly. Having been in opera and concert work before getting into education, I didn't expect it. There were the ego crises we solved, for instance. How to put on Peter and the Wolf, a play with six major parts and an indeterminate number of hunters. We solved our problems by asking each child who wanted to play a popular character (Peter, for instance) to share the role, dividing up the program into sections. Surprisingly, because, I believe, we included the children in the ongoing trouble-shooting, they easily accepted solutions that gave them a chance to be who they wanted to be. We created a tree from paper and indoor climbing equipment. The bird could climb up and be away from the wolf's jaws. We used blue paper for the duck pond. Our scene design sufficed for the children to imagine themselves in the play. My partner and I debated how to do some of the "stage business". I wanted to mime the part where Peter attaches the rope to the wolf's tail, but Sue won out, using a rope and clips to make that part of the play more real to the children. It worked well.

What especially impressed me was not only the self-assurance the children demonstrated, but also the attentiveness and sensitivity they displayed for the changing moods of the music and narrator's words. The bird flapped, the duck quacked, Peter skipped and danced, each to their own musical themes. When they music changed, their bodies reflected each cadence and tempo. We did not tell them to do anything specific, in keeping with our philosophy of education that insists on creative authenticity for our children.

What did these children learn? Did we "do" math, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies? Not in the traditional method of separating skills and inventing activities to target them. These areas were naturally embedded in the project. They learned and practiced such math concepts as seriation, patterns, and one-to-one correspondence. Language Arts became part of the mix through speaking, listening, reading (the book about the story) and writing (captions of pictures they drew of their favorite scenes. Science came into it when the scenery fell and we problem-solved how to keep it up! Our children displayed inventiveness in all stages of the project along with a strong motivation to master the necessary skills. In early childhood education how can we as teachers offer anything less?

As for the younger children who served as the audience, after the show they asked their teachers, "When can we do a play?"

The arts as cultural identity.

This is a child's mask from Nigeria. Children love masks as much as they love to pretend. We say that children use pretend play to consolidate knowledge, practicing skills. They use it to become larger than themselves. The arts throughout human history have facilitated people's knowledge of themselves, and of who they want to be. Children do the same.

We have been working with sound, have graduated to instruments, and now have come full circle to our original theme, not documented here: Visual art. My group of children created "talking drums" by designing and then reproducing their designs on paint drums with multi-color sharpies. My hope is that we will use these drums to call children to singing circle, using drumming as a way of communication. The art on the drums signifies the personal expression of my group and their communication of who they are.

My teaching partner wants to do the sense of taste next. Food is another way people express themselves and their culture through folk art. Art can be more than decorative. The exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Central Nigeria Unmasked, would be a good field trip for us. I think we are headed that way!

As many of you know, I teach Art, Music and Movement for Young Children at Northern Virginia Community College. I have just started another eight-week Hybrid course and a student posted in her journal this comment, which I will share with you.

"I can't believe what an eye opening experience this class has been for me!! I am taking this course for professional development to keep my teaching certification up to date. It just shows that no matter your age, career, or life experiences we truly need to keep growing and learning. I have gained so much knowledge of the arts and the importance of cultivating art and creativity in young children in the last 2 weeks…unbelievable!

Art is everywhere. It surrounds us on a daily basis. Having read the text chapters, Gail's blogs and watching videos, I realize I have been really lacking in my own use to explore the arts more with my students and with my own young children. I actually feel guilty, as if I have missed years of opportunities to be a better teacher and mom. So, it's time for a change! Just yesterday, my son came home with an art project that he called "horrible". It really made me sad to hear him say that. He told me the teacher said it wasn't right, that he did not follow the patterns correctly. Now, I am mad. My son is already very critical of his work, and hearing this from a teacher just made it worse. So, I told my son "Art can never be wrong. It is you expressing yourself and that makes mommy happy". I also added that I loved his use of blues and pinks and how he made it a swirl pattern. In the past, I would have given the usual reply of "That's great, cool, or pretty".

All I can say is,  "you CAN teach an old dog new tricks". " All I can say is, this is why I teach!

Our Sound Unit

It began when I opened one Wednesday morning and had to set out the "Question of the Day". This is an activity children do with their parents as they enter the childcare center. On a table is an intriguing question to answer through some sort of experimentation. This particular morning I set out musical instruments alongside various objects that could, in some way, produce sound. Maracas sat next to chopsticks and paper plates. A cow bell sat next to a gift wrap tube. The table was full. The question was: Which of these objects make music?

It was a trick question, of course. Anything can be used to make music.

Next we began exploring sound with real instruments, from children's rhythm sticks and our director's collection of world instruments to actual band instruments such as a horn, a trumpet, a clarinet, and more. The children learned about what makes high and low pitches on a xylophone or a thumb piano, how items such as beans or popcorn make unique sounds in a shaker, and how to produce different pitches and timbres by striking glass jars containing varying  amounts of water. My partner, Sue, brought in the band instruments and it gave me an idea. I emailed the local high school band director and the next week our class, with many willing parents, were seated in a rehearsal room listening to a wondrous demonstration of how different families of instruments combine to play music.

This led to...Peter and the Wolf! We played it before lunch the next day. Sue and I modeled movement to each  character's musical theme. The children followed. We learned more about some of them than we ever knew, about how one boy could totally inhabit music and express it through his body. How would we have known this if we hadn't taken the risk of playing Peter and the Wolf for sixteen four year olds? 

We continue on this journey. We learn as we go. Science, language arts, social studies and math naturally spring from this work. There's no need to compartmentalize. We all learn together.

Game Project

This is not my project. My partner, Sue, did this with her small group. They exhibited an interest in games. She asked them to bring in games from home and they began discussing the common elements of the games they were playing. Board games have paths, cards, spinners, and tricks, traps and freebies. The children quickly picked up on this. Sue asked them to design their own game, and she interviewed each of them to help them decide what the rules of their game would be. There were many steps to the process and a lot of hard work on both children and Sue's parts. The results were worth the efforts because the children each had a play-able game to take home, built on foam-board. A serendipitous event allowed the children to meet a sixth grader who had designed his own game, in response to his experience with cancer. Make-a-wish foundation facilitated  

the game-making so that the result was professional and beautiful. Our children eagerly asked the young game-maker pertinent and knowledgeable questions about how he designed his game. They looked up to him. Wanted to be like him. The children had a concrete example of who they could be in the future as creative people. The goals of education are that children grow up knowing that the knowledge they gain, not just isolated facts, but skills and dispositions, will make them the people they want to be. This was an example of that kind of education.

The Snowy Day: Teaching Art, Teaching Tolerance

 

I am breathless with excitement! The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats, is fifty years old, and a commemorative edition is out. I’ve already ordered it after reading about it in the Washington Post Style section today.

I was ten when book came out and felt that I was way too mature to look at a mere picture book, but I did happily read it to my daughters when they were little. Since we were living in the D.C. area and only visited my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio a few times in winter, the magic of snow in the city was mostly unfamiliar to them. Those few times that we did visit home, they made snow angels to their hearts’ content, as did the story’s protagonist Peter in The Snowy Day. We never talked about Peter as black. He was a little boy, just like some of the little boys they knew in school.

When I began teaching young children, Keat’s stories became a regular part of my curriculum. We went outside in the snow (with boots on!) to make snow angels and throw snowballs at trees (not at people!). The children enjoyed making tracks in the snow with sticks, as Peter did. They experimented with footprints, and we looked for animal tracks. I even photographed snow-tracks of different animals for guessing games. After reading Peter’s Chair, the children voted on a design of a chair we would sand and paint for the school’s auction. One little boy asked his mother to bring his baby sister to school for show-and-tell. Peter had a baby sister, so he wanted to share his!

Once I began teaching Language Arts for Young Children at Northern Virginia Community College I required my students to do an author report, sharing curriculum ideas, biographical, and bibliographical information. Much to my surprise, and a testament to the truism that teachers learn by teaching, I discovered that “Jack” was not black. He was a Jew of Eastern European descent, and that he changed his name to Keats from Katz because of the anti-Semitism he experienced in New York. My own mother experienced such anti-Semitism in urban Cleveland during those same years. A simple story about a little boy became intensely personal for me.

Keats expressed his love for his tumbledown urban, integrated (“diverse”) neighborhood through his art.  Keats’ love of art, of his life in a city of graft and graffiti, inspired his storytelling even as both he and his subjects suffered from prejudice and bigotry.

Teachers can take Keats’ work as a springboard for many activities that inspire interest in science, art, literature and math. They do this all the time. African-American teachers can and do use The Snowy Day for Black History month, since Peter was the first black child featured in an American picture book. What else can we do?

A large part of teaching young children includes emotional literacy: Knowing and understanding your own feelings in order to understand other people. Can we talk about how Keats felt a kinship with his black protagonist because of his own experience in a less than tolerant country? Can we talk about feeling left out or disliked with young children by asking them to journal about their own experiences? Can we talk about understanding others? Even as my mother and her family suppressed her roots to get by in twentieth century urban American, (the family name, Mansfeld, was changed to Mansfield), Keats changed his name to hide his own roots. We don’t want children to feel they have to do the same thing with any aspect of their identities. We want them to become fearless in art and fearless in communication, bridging divides while expressing themselves authentically, just as he did. How do you do this in your teaching practice? Share your thoughts.

Pink Toys, Blue Toys

When I was a child, lo these many moons ago, gender identity was fixed and well-policed by cultural mores and taboos. As a young girl I preferred my brother’s doctor kit to the nurse kit Santa brought me, but my mother patiently explained that I was a girl, my brother was a boy, and we got the toys meant for who we were. How different it was back in the fifties. Or was it?

I read in The Washington Post, in an op-ed by Peggy Orenstein, that Legos, Inc. is aggressively marketing new sets that are aimed at little girls. Primary colors have always been the mainstay of Lego sets but what with the onset of girl-marketing the colors they are a-changing. The new sets, Creative Cakes, Butterfly Beauty Shop, and Stephanie’s Cool Convertible, to name just a few, feature pastel colors to match the pastel themes of each. No doubt these sets will find eager fans. I teach young children and those of us in this business are deeply aware of the power of pink (and violet) on young girls. I myself recently sponsored a pink crayon/marker drive at school to satisfy this lust among my pink-starved girls. To be fair, I included green in this effort to satisfy my boys who, contrary to popular belief, prefer it to blue.

But what’s to prevent this trickle of pastel blocks from becoming a torrent of aspiration-dilution in girls? Already my girls worship at the altar of the Disney Princesses. Once upon a time (my time) Cinderella had her own identity, as did Snow White. Perhaps they were defined by their relationships with men, but at least they weren’t lumped together and interchangeable. How far will this go?

After reading Lise Eliot’s Pink Brain, Blue Brain, my commitment to providing learning experiences for girls and boys that allowed for playing in cross-competencies was reinforced. If boys wanted to build, girls would be encouraged to build, and their minds seeded with the idea that Betty could build as well as Bob. If boys wanted or appeared interested in drawing and writing, their minds would similarly be engaged at any level that appealed to them. Perhaps, as Ms. Orenstein writes, this was behind Legos interest in making building kits for girls. Perhaps it was only a profit motive, taking advantage of the tyrannical gender separation that begins at age four. In any case, seeing these sets incites me to a sense of radical commitment to encouraging competencies in every area of children’s creativity, regardless of color (pastel or otherwise). If your daughter adores the Disney princesses you are not duty-bound to provide them with a steady diet of girly play opportunities (Pink markers and crayons are okay).You can guide them beyond the pink curtain in a playful and loving way.

For years I’ve taught the Nutcracker Ballet to fours. My unit always starts with asking children what they know about ballet. The boys invariably state that ballet is for girls (ugh) and the girls begin to pirouette. We talk about story-telling through movement, watch a video of the ballet in stages, and practice the difficult leaps and sprints they see on the video. By the end of the unit the boys might still say ballet is for girls, but leap and twirl to the Nutcracker’s music, asking for toy soldier dress-ups. Minds change gradually. Be a part of the change.