Bring Your Paintings Out in the Rain!

As I was going through photos today, I ran across a number of picture sets of things that I had intended to blog about a LONG time ago. When life gets crazy, the blog is typically the first thing to go. Now that I am reorganizing and rethinking things, I thought I would pull a couple of those "someday" posts together for you. (For those of you who have children in care, you will notice that these photos are almost a year old- but that's okay)

Last summer- we had a couple of great days of warm, summer rain. It wasn't raining really hard- gently, just slightly more than a sprinkle... So we decided that we would create some paintings and bring them outside in the rain.

In order to keep the paper from tearing- and for the process to work best, we opted to use pieces of freezer paper to paint on. We also used a combination of tempera and watercolor paints, being water soluble- the rain could have an impact on the painting.

We spent some time working on our paintings- the children speculated as they painted as to what might happen. The predictions were quite varied, from the paint washing completely off so that we would have to paint the paper all over again to nothing happening at all- we would just get wet paper.

The forecast was to rain all day- so we didn't worry too much about the time or hurrying to get outside. When the children were finally ready to go outside- the rain had nearly stopped. There were only a few very light sprinkles in the air. I gave the children the option to "make more rain" by using a spray bottle, but they decided that they wanted to keep their paintings just the way they were and then- we went to hop in the mud puddles!

The end result- well, we can try for that for another day!

We came to the conclusion that if you really want it to stop raining-

just make a plan to do something really cool in the rain!

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A Few Ideas With Marker Caps (As Promised)

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My friend died

I learned a hell of a lot from Dan Hodgins. He was mentor, a friend, and a "bone shaker" for many of us in the field of Early Childhood Education. He was and will always be a champion for children, and protector of childhood. I have so many great memories of time spent with him, it just doesn't seem like we had enough time. Dan died this past Saturday. Interestingly enough, Dan and I talked about death quite a bit. It is one of those topics that isn't talked about all that much in our field, but is super important. All living things eat, all living things poop, and all living things die. Dan and I recorded a podcast for awhile called "Shaking Bones." Dan was always shaking bones, even before I met him. To say I was honored to be asked to be his co-host would be putting it lightly. I loved recording with him. He was never afraid to touch on topics that were a bit edgy, or issues that sometimes weren't talked about much at all. We even...

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