Glimpses of After School; Winter

On an early November day, we stay outdoors later than usual to soak up the gorgeous weather, and enjoy using soccer balls.   A few days later, rain and a cold wind keep us indoors for the first time this school year and one child pulls out his guitar while others choose games--Amazing Labyrinth, Jellybean Land--and play with blocks and animals.  Indoor activity over blustery wet days includes Rig-ama-jig; working together with the enormous wooden construction pieces and the chunky nuts and bolts, the children create amazing structures.

A donated plastic shopping cart is a huge hit on the play lot and a group of children invent Football Shopping Cart Tag.  When the temps dip, we shorten our outdoor play a bit; the rest of the week the kids still thoroughly enjoy the woods and play structure, and there is even sledding!  Sticks are used as magic, for making symbols in the snow, for building and as walking sticks.  Conversations about magic powers, and what inherent powers they see in one another, bubble.

In the Art Room, a child initiates a marker transfer project, drawing an image, dampening it, laying it down on another piece of paper.  Another shares her quack-quack origami (paper beaks) and goes on to fold other creatures and to write stories on the alpha smart. A pair starts a book making project, others enjoy the game Stratego and still others develop and improvise characters on-the-fly in their fantasy play.  One child prompts a pom-pom project and others join in cardboard, popsicle stick and hot glue constructions.  Safety concern leads to talk about skin and its layers, and we pull out a ‘Human Body’ pamphlet from a science shelf (Foss Science Stories) to read ‘The Frozen Man, by I.C. Mann, a story about a 5,000 year old iceman named Oetzi (from the Oetztal Alps) with discussion of the Stone and Bronze Ages.  

We hurry inside after the rains have caught us; it’s good to towel off wet hair and join the Ribbon Dance legacy or be part of an appreciative audience.   Cat’s cradle and tic-tac-toe engage us, and we some do research for a story on magic and home design.  The children examine their fossils from the Great Swamp Conservancy field trip and put together airplane models.  It’s a big day for blocks and animals, too! 

The children thoughtfully choose a good spot to install a seut feeder in the woods.  It’s a wild and windy day after a full moon and we come in for calm and quiet, drawing and making posters.  Later some cooperate and compete at Foosball, others play with blocks and animals.  Conversation turns to national issues of justice, which we explore respectfully.  A child gets very interested in counting and writes out equations and counts all the flags on the map of the world. 

An interesting project comes up: we measure the parking lot for the Building Committee!   Later, we plant daffodil bulbs in soil and put the pot on a windowsill in the art room.  The next day they go into the refrigerator for 3 weeks to stimulate growth after a wintry nap. Finally they take their place on the windowsill in the Sahara room where they will enjoy the sun.  We bring Jellybean Land upstairs for those who don’t choose to build with Rig-ama-jig, and the construction crew works together on their project. 

Outside, the enormous mounds of snow make for great sledding, and there’s much shoveling and mound exploring.  Once we shed boots, snow gear and snow, we realize that Spanish class is being held in the Dragon Room so we can’t get the materials we had hoped to use.  Instead, we work with oil-based modeling clay while we listen to a CD and happily recognize ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ when it comes around, singing along.

Despite rain, there is vigorous sledding and sliding on the snowbank!  Engineering and Architecture Club gathers to create dream landscapes in the mountains of the world, and to continue working a 3-D structure made out of cardboard, fabric, papers, popsicle sticks and various art supplies to create elements of interior space.  In the Sahara Room, we’re reading ‘I’m Bored,’  ‘Who’s a Pest?’ and started ‘The Desert Fox.’   As so often, there are acts of kindness: an origami crane offered to a child inconsolable over his own attempt; a block structure is downsized, to share parts with others collaborating with blocks and animals