Studio Purple, Week #17

Enjoying once again being able to dig in our now soft sand, Kyla, Amelia and Tessa together create a whimsical mouse.

This joyful experience together among comfortable friends may have influenced Amelia’s thinking later as she painted alongside Tessa at our easel.  We made note that her painting depicted a small mouse nestled in a tree trunk.

What subtle or hidden ways do we reveal our connection to each other?

We introduced a new weekly activity.  Wondering how best to begin to enable the children to understand friendships and how we solve problems in relationships, we thought of exploring problem solving through drawing.  Creating a prompt, we present the children a very relatable problem and ask them to draw ways they might solve it.

Beginning by reading the story Little One by Ann and Paul Rand where the number 1 seeks to find a way to play with other numbers.  We asked the children…

You want to play but you don’t know how to join.  How can you be with someone?

"...They can ask! Look it! They asking! This one is the tiny one and this is the big one and look it, they're playing with so many blocks. That's a tower!" -Zack
"Mine is the same thing as Sam's. They can ask!" -Charlie Menke (Sam has helped him write the word ask)
"They can take turns. He's moving it over (the car)." -Eva
"He's trying to knock down his building of a digger. He's nice guy but a little bit mean cause he wants to knock down the scrap digger. He had a solution! He didn't knock down the building and the guys' smiling!" -Mika
"(you can) Ask somebody!" -Luca
"He's saying can I play." -Sam

As we continue exploring relationships through problem solving,

What will we discover about each other?  What will we discover about ourselves?  

The moon continues to capture our curiosity.  Reading the story Moon by Britta Teckentrup we were introduced once again to the changing moon shapes.  However, our reflection of seeing the moon out this morning before arriving to school challenged us.

“Last night I saw the moon with eyes and a mouth.” -Jack
“I saw it this morning.” -Kyla
“That’s because the moon was still awake.  It’s awake at the morning time.  He sleeps at morning time and wakes up in the nighttime.” -Jack
“Just like bats!  (We can see it) Cause the sun’s not really bright yet that’s why!” -Alex
“The moon is awake in the night and morning time, he’s right.” -Jack
“The moon is always awake, you just can’t see it all the time.” -Johann

We had a delightful treat on Friday sharing our space with Diane and the children attending Plus Fridays!  Not only was it fun showing familiar friends some of what we’ve been doing in Studio Purple we even got to share together having music with Kyla’s mom Kat!  Ask us about the the very fun song where we passed instruments to each other!