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Stella sits down with some felt square and announces that she is making a tent. She folds one to make the tent shape, but when she tries placing it on the table, it instantly bounces back to a flat shape. Undaunted, she takes a different approach, creating a tent with two squares.
Josie is interested and takes a seat at the table. Mark describes Stella’s technique: putting two squares apart from each other on the bottom, and then connecting them at the top. At first, she seems to get it right away.
But this technique is tricky – sometimes it appears easy, but other times Josie still seems to be wrapping her brain around the concept, putting the squares together at the bottom and becoming frustrated when they fall over. (Have we mentioned the importance of repetition?!) Mark reminds her of Stella’s technique of starting with the squares apart at the bottom. When Josie does this, she is then reticent to join them at the top; somehow it doesn’t make sense, and she resists. But soon she is successful, and she expands her exploration, leaning another felt square against one opening of the tent. She moves the wooden figures around, perhaps wondering if these could be used to stop the base of a felt square from sliding. After further experimentation, Josie discovers that she can lean a square against the cabinet beside the table, making a lean-to. A wooden figure is hidden inside, invisible, and she peeks in at it.
Jamie and Chris insert unit blocks through a big block, making them disappear under the cabinet. Jamie explains: It’s a tunnel.
We have seen an enduring interest in the pipes in a block – perhaps because of the challenges presented:
What can fit (disappear!) in here? How do we retrieve an object that we can’t grab with our hands?
Here’s the story:
First we discovered that the wooden figures and our arms and hands can disappear inside the pipes.
Next we noticed that when a wooden figure was inside a small pipe, we couldn’t get it out because our hands were too small. Like the other children, Josie tried reaching with her fingers, without success. Fortuitously, a child had recently dropped a mallet down a flex cabinet hole beside Josie, and Mark wondered aloud: I wonder if there’s a tool that would help you.
That was all the clue Josie needed: looking around briefly, she spied it, and knew just what to do! Wesley saw her technique and tried it too.
Finally, we discovered that the unit blocks can be passed through the larger pipes.
Scarves can make things and people disappear, too...
Birds disappear and reappear over here, too –
When Studio Yellow was turning children into buried treasure, Ellie and Livia were happy to join in!
