ExploraStory

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I was intrigued by the way shadows are solid shapes.  In fact, the book Shadow from last week has a part that tells how shadows need no adornment, they are just black.  So from this I started thinking about shapes of shadows, and then shapes in general.  There are plenty of shapes that we know, and in Mouse Shapes by Ellen Walsh (who also wrote the awesome Mouse Paint  and Mouse Count), we got to see how simple shapes become very interesting pictures.

But not all shapes are ones we can name, or even all agree what they look like.  For instance, in It Looked Like Spilled Milk by Charles Shaw, sometimes a shape can remind us very clearly of something and look just like a rabbit…but it’s not.  The last book we read was just for funsies, Penguin Dreams by Jeff Seibold.

I kind of thought that we could make shapes, and then make other things out of the shapes we made, but in practice this wasn’t really all that interesting for everyone.  Maybe if we start with lots of shapes already cut out for us to put together it would be interesting.  Maybe tangrams or something like that.  Even so, the what we did was still pretty cool:

 Emily drew a picture and and cut out shapes to fill in the drawing.  Emily also made some more random shapes and then brought it to life in a few different ways.  This instance of the shape became a monster at a carnival.

At the end of last week, we danced with the lights off and saw our shadows on the wall.  I thought this was so interesting, the way our shadow seems like a part of us but can also seem so different and strange, like someone we know when we see them, but we have no idea what their name is.  Are shadows good or bad, like we are?  Two stories we read, Moonlight and Shadow by Elisabeth Jones and James Coplestone and Quentin Fenton Herter III by Amy MacDonald thought about this idea, with some very different experiences.  However, Shadow by Marcia Brown was my favorite book this week and has been on my mind since.  Just try out these lines.  Read them slowly:

shadow lives in the forest
It goes forth at night
to prowl around the fires
It even likes to mingle
with the dancers
Thus it is both prowler and dancer

But it is mute
It never speaks
It listens.

Whoa!  Cool, right?  So this week I did bring my camera.  Check it out:

Here is some shadow work we did on the wall.  It was a three person operation to have someone stand by the wall, someone to hold the flashlight, and someone to trace the shadow out.  I think we can see Laura filling in the shadows of her hands, but wth purple instead of black, which I thought was a great choice.

 In this one, Moira (I’m sorry if I spelled it wrong!)  Make a sculpture and described its shadow.  The neat part, I thought, was that the space where the shadow falls is black on white, and so the shadow itself is white too.  This was a very interesting and complicated project.

 Lastly, and I can’t remember who made this one, is scissors and shadow.  What I like most about this one is that the scissors that cast the shadow were the way it was cut out, almost like reaching onto a dark wall and using your hands to grab your shadow from the wall. 

Explorastory has been meeting for the last few weeks, but the posts are a little behind.  Not to worry!  I wrote down what we read and did.  Two weeks ago we tried out dancing!  We read Wiggle by Doreen Cronin  and Who Bop? by Jonathon London.  I love when we get to read jazz books because it’s so easy to play some jazz while we read.  In fact, we got to listen to the song Joe Lovano Tango by Dave Brubeck, with Joe Lovano playing a saxophone.  It really got the mood movin’. 

We danced to the group Daddy A Go Go as they played their song Kid’s Beat Bop.  We held scarves in our hands so that we could see the way we moved while we danced.  The song has a lot of energy in it because it’s really a cover of Blitzkrieg Bop by The Clash!

We also read from a book of poems called Dance With Me by Brabara Juster Ebensen.  The poem was called shadow dancers and it told us about dancing with shadows watching them as the do just what we did.  We decided to try it out by turning off all the lights and putting a flashlight in the middle of the room.  Then we danced in front of the light and saw our shadows dance!  Unfortunately, I forgot my camera so there are no pictures, but the upside is that this would be an easy dance to do at home.  Try it!

Today was a lot of fun!  Thinking still about Duck On a Bike, we tried to think of things that animals can do and places they go.  A few people told us where they saw animals, like outside in yards or in the zoo.  But if a duck can ride a bike, why couldn’t we see other animals in strange places, too?  For instance, have you ever seen sheep on a boat?  Nancy Shaw must have.

Do you know what a rabbit would be doing in a bathtub?  What do you do?  Well, get clean of course! 

And you know where we saw an ant?  Somewhere he shouldn’t have been!

So, some people made some animals appear in very unlikely places.  For instance there is Lauren’s caterpillar in a bathtub, Moira’s dragonfly who made it all the way to an iceberg at the North Pole!

It wasn’t quite the topic for everyone though.  Emmett and Nolan worked on an awesome flag, mostly from their pirate ship at home which they talked about when they saw the boat the sheep sailed on.    Yearrggh!

I thought that after seeing a bike that Sam built we would be excited to try building our own machines, or at least thinking about what we need to build them.  I thought we needed some parts, so I went to the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op in the Flats near downtown Cleveland.  They were very nice and friendly and let me poke around their awesome huge shed that was full of bikes and bike parts.  They even taught me how to take some of the things apart so we could have them for Explorastory.  Check out what I found there!

After hearing the story of Henry’s Amazing Machine by Dayle Dodds, we read a poem from In the Spin of Things.   This collection of poems by Rebecca Dotlich honors things that move, like washing machines: “Here’s to your spin; your soapsud song!”

Then we set to work on the bike parts and other machine ideas.  Alex found some beads to decorate a cassette of gears, and Hattie actually made a picture about of a duck riding a bike, based on the story we read last week.   Not everyone was into bicycle projects though, we sort of branched out into general interest in paint and collage.  Maybe the children are just more willing to move on from summer than some of us!

                                                                                      Lauren’s collage work

Lastly, a very big THANK YOU to Angela who donated some awesome supplies like fabric, straws and pipe cleaners to our art closet!  This will be wonderful and well used in the next few weeks.

School started this week, but I’m tellin’ you there is a lot more fun to be had out there.  Today we thought all about bikes, how we ride them, how they are made and what it feels like to ride.  We looked at some books PLUS we had a super fun visit from Sam, who brought in a bike he built all by himself.  (check back soon for a picture – I can’t believe I forgot to take one!). 

Actually, we started out with Digger Man by Andrea Zimmerman whose books we enjoyed very much last week.  Digger man uses his big digger to dig and push dirt around.  It looked like people were interested in the idea of a huge pile of dirt, so maybe we’ll have to think about how we could do that in the library. 

But bike was the word of the day.  Duck on a Bike by David Shannon and Froggy Rides a Bike by Jonathon London opened up a discussion about what you need to ride a bike.  Can ducks and frogs ride bikes in real life?  What are they missing that we have?

So with the materials we made, of course, bikes.  Many people made models, but Olivia had a beautiful idea.  She made handle bars with tassles and a helmet and ran around the room peddling an imaginary bike.  And just check out these cool designs!

string and paper            wood, clay and wire       wood, tape, wire and playdoh
     

a very artist take here.  See the progression:
      later,

Now, I think we did a great job exploring the construction of a bike.  But how do we ride it?  Why does pedaling work?  Could we ever build a bike that a duck or frog really could ride?  Keep thinking for next time.

Lee Road’s August 14^th ExploraStory got us thinking about dinosaurs. Dinosaur skeletons and fossils are discovered all the time, and the kids in our group had even seen some at the Natural History Museum. Some storybooks are about how dinosaur bones are found; others tell what the world was like in the time when dinosaurs lived. How did people figure out how dinosaurs lived by finding their bones and putting them together? How did they guess what colors the dinosaurs were, and what they looked like? These were some of the topics we explored today through stories and art.

 We started out with the book “Dinosaur Bones” by Bob Barner. This book had a simple rhyming text in bold print for the story part and smaller text with facts about dinosaurs for older kids. Since our group members were all two to three years old, we focused on the rhyme. Kylie pointed out that the dinosaur skeleton had really big, sharp teeth. When I asked what it ate, she said “Chicken!” I’m sure the dinosaur would have been thrilled with that choice had it existed in its time.

 We did a rhyme where we pretended to be dinosaurs, and I showed a nonfiction book called “Dinosaur Discoveries” by Gail Gibbons, which featured drawings of paleontologists digging up dinosaur bones. The next page showed them creating a model of a live dinosaur based on the assembled skeleton. I asked the children, how did they guess what the dinosaur looked like when it was alive just by seeing some bones? If you were making a dinosaur, how do you think it should look? What color would it be?

 We explored this idea with Model Magic clay. Kylie was excited about making a green dinosaur. Our younger participants, James and Kellen, mixed the colors and enjoyed watching them swirl together. They seemed to like the tactile experience of mashing the clay between their hands. Everyone experimented with molding different shapes and adding on more clay in different colors. In the end, the kids were so proud of their creations that that they held them up right in front of my camera lens. Take a look:

When I rode into work today, there were some guys with big hammers and chisles standing around outside.  I thought they were exterminators at first, but as it turns out they were here to redo some of the sidewalk panels.  This was very interesting because it’s not often that you get to see what falls through the cracks and ends up under  the sidewalk.  So we read two books about construction, Dig! by Andrea Zimmerman of Trashy Town fame, and one by a favorite author of mine, Tana Hoban, called Construction Zone.  She uses photography to bring a very close, realistic feeling to what we are used to seeing drawn or painted.  Far from being a dry documentarian, she uses close ups and humor to present real life examples of both common and uncommon objects.  Check her out!

We went outside and looked at the space where the sidewalk used to be.  There were cool chunks left over with flat parts that used to be the surface.  Looking closer, we saw lots of small stones, and then Emmett noticed how soft and cool the sand was.  Sam was really into the sand, so he gathered some up to use in the Exploring part.  He seemed to really enjoy the way sand felt and the way it moves when it pours.  He liked it so much that he built a funnel so he could pour it over and over!  There were lots of other great construction projects that got underway.  Houses, ramps, scale models of buildings, are just a few.  Jacob made an awesome dump truck!

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My name is Sarah, and I am one of the children’s librarians at Lee Road Library. When I was given the very cool assignment of developing my own set of ExploraStory programs (see Henry and Elizabeth’s blogs about ExploraStory at Coventry), I was excited because I saw a tremendous opportunity for creativity and fun. It also got me thinking about storytimes in a new way. What is the best way to build a community where adults and children learn from and inspire each other? This is a challenge I hope to gain new understanding of during the four weeks this program will run.

We explored the topic of building, and began by singing the song “Johnny Works With One Hammer”.  Then we read our first story, “Building With Dad” by Carol Nevius. This was a very interesting book, with large, close-up illustrations, lots of bird’s eye views and neat perspectives. The children were very interested in a picture showing a man welding, which led to a discussion about welding and what it is. Welders showed up again in another book, leading Chris to exclaim “There’s someone else doing that thing with the fire!”

Our next book was “The Sand Castle” by Brenda Yee, about a group of children collaborating on a sand castle. We talked about the similarities and differences between the two types of building, and compared it to pictures in a nonfiction book about real castles. The children seemed interested in the parts of the castle, and why it was surrounded by water. This led to an interesting discussion about moats and their purpose. The kids guessed that moats existed to keep people from climbing or digging under the castle walls. The most magical part of the storytime came when Chris picked up “The Lot At the End of My Block” and said “Let’s see what this guy decides to build”. All of the other children looked over his shoulder as he told the story based on the pictures. I asked questions, and he and the other children answered them, giving further detail to the story. This was a marvelous example of the Reggio principles that children are strong and capable learners, and that everyone learns from each other by engaging in discussion on topics that interest them.

The very inquisitive Anne asked during a story, “When do we get to the exploring part?” Soon after, I told them that I brought several different kinds of blocks and Legos for them to build with. Chris and Sophie were building models of their houses. Anne was inspired by the photographs and drawings of the moats surrounding the castles, and made her own moat out a set of printed blocks that had water as part of the pictures on them. Sophie saw my camera as I took pictures of the projects, and pretended with her mother that her block with a circular hole in it was a camera. These projects showcased some of the wonderful qualities of children that will lead to great problem-solving ability as they grow into adults; specifically, the ability to see unlikely similarities between things, and thus use imagination to find substitutes for what is absent. I was blown away by how solicitous everyone was towards each other, learning names and working together in discussion, projects, and cleanup. In the span of about forty minutes, this group of drop-in participants felt like a definite community. I’m excited to see how we will grow in future sessions.