Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Transformer Reflections

The trip to visit the transformer statues clearly wasn't a "one and done" experience.  As we revisited the children's responses to them, we were struck with the idea of "guardians" that was expressed by Wilder and Finlay.  We decided to follow up with a conversation,
    What do you know about guardians?
    Finlay - They're ancient.
    Brigitte - What does ancient mean?
    Finlay - Like really, really old.
    Cate - Like they're rusty.
    Wilder - They were big.  Bigger than you, Jill.
    Brigitte - What were they guarding.
    Finlay - The house.  I mean the humans. 
   Cape - They guarded the house in the old days. I went to the children's museum and I saw a guard there.
    Jill - Did you see guardians in a movie?
    Finlay - A lot of movies have guardians.  
    Lucas - I've watched "Frozen" hundreds of times.  
After some debate, the children agree that there are guardians in "Frozen."
  Cape -We need two green guardians with stop signs on their gloves.  I need them for my house.  
    

After lunch, Cape went directly to the collage area to create his green guard (upper left hand corner).  His glove (the watercolor leaf) is holding a stop sign.  The horizontal watch and arm represent the steps to the house that the guard is protecting.  He added the stars because it it night time. 

As children worked with collage, they carefully selected and positioned their materials.  They demonstrated flexible thinking as they used materials to represent different things.  In the collage above, Cape cut a red leaf image to be the stop sign.  Cate used a small gear as the center of her flower.  Children also demonstrated creativity in the way they attached materials to the base.  For example, Remy left parts of the arms and legs un-glued, so that they could move!

Jade's collage

Remy's collage

Cate's collage

Lucas' collage

While working:  
   Jade - I'm making a guardian.
   Remy - I'm making a creature.  This (eye on top) is the head.  
   Lucas - I'm making a collage.
   Jade - I'm making Mickey Mouse (the top three "snowflake" circles look like Mickey Mouse).  My guard is at night (as she added the star shapes).
    Lucas - (As he looks at his finished collage). Mine is an obstacle course.  You start on the eye.  
    Cate - I'm making a guardian head and body (center flower pieces).  A flower dress.  It's a flower girl.  A flower guardian.  
   

Finlay's collage

Jade's collage

Bea's collage

The ideas kept coming today.  We had more conversations and more collages.  Here's a sample of what the children said while working:
  Finlay - I'm going to make a dementor.  Guess what's really scary about dementors.  Their body is not connected to their head.  (He represents this in his collage.). Let's put some little gadgets in here.
    Jade - I'm making a guard.  He has a special job.  He guards the pumpkin patch to make sure no one takes the pumpkins.
  Finlay - (With a small spring). Did you take this spring from the transformers?
    Jill - No!  I didn't take it from the transformers.  
    Finlay - These look like real transformer things.  
    Jade - (Adding a lego piece) He's holding a sword.  
   Finlay - Are you thinking what I'm thinking?  We could build a guard for the school!  (Adding a piece of jewelry to his collage) I'm putting this gold here.  This guy is guarding the gold.
   Cape - (Coming to the collage table to add more to his collage). You know what my guard is guarding?  This special emerald.  Look!  I'm layering again.  (Layering of materials had been encouraged earlier.)
    Bea -(Starts collaging on a small piece of paper, but realizes that she would like to use bigger images.  She decides to connect a bigger piece of paper to her original work. ) The big stuff goes on the bigger paper and the small stuff goes on the smaller paper. It's a flower garden.  Or maybe I'll decide what it is when I'm done, like Lucas did.Maybe it will be a flower maze.  (She layers jewels on top of the cat's eyes.). Look!  The cat has sunglasses.  (Adding two metal pieces to the cat's head.). Now he's a police cat.  I'll put a watch next to him so he knows what time it is. 

Finlay is not the only one to suggest we build guardians for the school.  We will spend next week thinking about possible materials for this investigation!

"I'm going to put all the paint on.  It's going to be beautiful."                   Wilder

Children children used paint to fill in the spaces they created with glue last week.  We noticed that children used the paint just as carefully as they had when placing  the collage images.   The results are stunning!

Building a Zoo

About two weeks ago, Luke suggested that we could build a zoo.  Today was the day!  Building experiences often require collaboration and problem solving and that was true today as well.  The children initially built tall, but soon realized a more spread out system of spaces would work better as a zoo.   No problem!  The quickly worked to make the changes.
   Lucas - I'm making a machine for feeding.  If the animals are hungry, they can go in.
  Remy - Look how dark it is!  It's a great place for a sleepover!
Reflecting on their work later....
    Wilder - We made cages out of blocks.  
    Cate - The animals escaped!
    Jill - Then what happened?
   Luke - Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.  We were the zookeepers.
    Lily - There were even dinosaurs.
    Bea - And there were bugs, but they needed more space and more bug friends... more bugs.