What does it mean to connect?

As we have been reflecting on our work over the past few weeks (6-ish), we realized that we have come back to a word that we discussed (amongst ourselves) quite a bit at the beginning of the school year: connection(s).  As you may recall, our Fall Classroom Stories night focused on the development of relationships and the connections that the children were making with each other, the languages, our classroom, and the school in general.  Recently, with Cedar's trip to Kenya, we have returned to connections by way of message making, bridges, owls, airplanes, marking our package's path on a map, marking other locations on maps, FaceTime calls to connect with Cedar, and more.  At the beginning, the conversations focused on how to get our package of messages to Cedar, and as we began to explore some of their theories, they began to draw and construct bridges and owls; ways to connect with Cedar while she was away.  The structure of a bridge, and the ability to extend the bridge from point A to point B, and then to point C, opened up this new way of thinking about connections. 
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Today, as part of laying some foundational thought process for how we can make connections/bring things together/extend smaller marks (bridges, pathways), we offered a long piece of paper, with two different colors of tape on each end, and asked, "What does it mean to connect?" and "How can we connect our blue tape to our green tape?" 

Audrey and Reed showed so much respect for the materials that had been set up for them to work with. 

"You have to tip-toe over there." - Reed

As a strategy to pause, and think about a few different ways we could make these connections, we read a book called, Lines.  There are many methods and tools for making lines, and lines can help us connect. 

How could we connect our blue tape to our green tape?
​What does it mean to connect?

"Put pencils right there." - Reed

"Draw." - Audrey

"Allllllll the way to Cedar." - Reed

How can we use the paint to connect the tape? - Elyse

Reed and Audrey decided to start on the same end of the paper after they each chose their own color (which helped us differentiate their work and think about how to connect their strokes. 

How can you connect your paint strokes?

As each of the girls began to make strokes down the length of the paper, we noticed that they each had different techniques and there were some gaps/empty space between their marks.  

Reed's technique involved moving on her knees with the jar of paint in her right hand, while stroking the paper with the brush in her left hand. 

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Audrey scooted along with one leg up, and moved her jar along the floor as she stroked.  She also showed attention to filling in her strokes as she worked; strokes that faded as her brush lost the paint.

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Then, Audrey made the first connection between their colors.

Wait, there are gaps in our lines/connections.  "How can we connect your [Reed] pink strokes?" 

The other side of the paper

"How can we bring them together?" - Elyse 

"Look!" - Reed

"Now they're together. You made a connection." - Elyse

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Sylvie and Lucia's turn to make the connections

Just as we did with Audrey and Reed, we started by reading the book about lines. When we finished the book, Sylvie began giving us some ideas on how we might proceed: 

"​Maybe we can find all the ways that we can..we can...Let's try to do over here and on the edges [using finger to point to the blue tape]."  - Sylvie
Lucia is watching Sylvie and listening attentively. 
"Lucia can be on that side and we can work together. Maybe Lucia, you, and I can do it all together." - Sylvie

Sylvie's initial stroke 

Watching Lucia work as she moves to make her own strokes.

"We're almost running out of paint. Look at all these lines [the broken strokes]. - Sylvie

"Maybe I can do it on a different side?" - Sylvie

Using a long stroke to meet Lucia's orange.