September | 2014 | Art Education Outside The lines

Every Saturday I race to flip through the sections of the previous Sunday’s New York Times I didn’t get through before the next edition hits our doorsteps. This week, in an article from September 4th on (de Blasio’s) new public pre-K programs in NYC, I found one of the single best sentences I’ve ever read about education. It seems the new program is supporting professional development for early childhood educators to familiarize them with play-based approaches to learning. It all sounds “very Reggio” as we often say, shorthand for education inspired by the Italian Reggio Emilia model. At this point the training has been rather minimal – just three days – and in the end the author argues the teachers need more than a love of children and certifications.

They need worldliness and quick intellectual reflexes.

And with that, she had me. The most perfect, pithy description I have ever come across for what it takes to be an effective and engaging educator.

I’m not sure how many kids ask their parents, “Can I do food coloring?” Perhaps more than I can imagine. Cora has been doing food coloring since she was one. That’s when we started taking a set of translucent tupperware containers (red, yellow, and blue + one clear) into the bath to transfer colored water from one to another and watch the magic.

Last year for her birthday, we filled squirt guns with colors and she and her “friends” made some collaborative paintings (see Paint by Squirt Gun).

This summer, after our freezer was accidentally defrosted and refrozen by our very well meaning dog sitters, we harvested a giant clump of ice and got busy pouring with salt food colored water on it. Thanks again Tinkerlab for a great invitation!

These were all exciting experiences that provided us both “permission to play.” But the fun really began for me this weekend when Cora asked for food coloring and made her own choices about what to do with it. Her actions echoed those from the past, but she was the master of ceremonies, determining the tools she needed and the order of events. Here’s a quick recap.

I was busy for hours on end making sauces and pressure canning them so Cora was getting into just about every nook and cranny of the kitchen trying to keep herself occupied. She eventually stumbled on a stack of tiny blue plastic cups we have used for grape juice in our hippie hebrew school program. She stacked them and counted them and stacked them again. Then she made her request,

“Mom, can I do food coloring?”

While Cora was ready to line up 50 cups to play with, she settled on 5, which turned into 6 once we realized we needed another to complete a rainbow of colors.

After that, she asked for a plate to put them on. I gave her two; one dark blue, one white. She moved the cups from one plate to the other talking about how they looked different one each. Then came the request for “a block of cheese.” It took awhile, but I finally realized she meant a block of ice. So, we filled a square tupperware about a 3/4 of an inch with water and found some other things to do while it froze.