Signs at Joes

So we took our Friendly Signs on the road and went out into the community to see what would happen if we waved our signs.  If people were feeling grouchy would the signs influence their feelings? Would they feel less grouchy?

We were excited but we took this expedition seriously. We documented the conversations that we had with the people we encountered.  We dropped to our knees and started writing immediately. 

Sometimes we had to establish systems to streamline the amount of feedback that we were receiving. Ella placed a happy face and a sad face at the top of her paper and then she would record the comments beneath the correct column.

 

"We stood outside Joe's Inn with our signs. I think Joe Driebe who is the owner came outside and said that the sings make him feel happy. It might have been a worker for the pizza restaurant. "

"I was walking around with the signs. Lots of people said that the signs made them happy.  One person said that he was happy to see happiness in the world. Another person said  they were going to go make more people happy in the world like we did."

I person said that  "I would love to have a piece of love on this Earth."

 "This is me zooming to a person with my sign and clipboard. I would ask if I could have a little time and they would say yes."

" We went inside Joe's Inn and we talked to two of the workers. One said that the smiley face sign looked like his friend. This made me laugh because the smiley face was very funny and I did not think it looked like his friend."

We returned to Sabot with the knowledge that our signs did brighten a little piece of the world that we touched that day.

 We reflected on our results and realized that "Ho, No! Too Many Happys" (note the giant clipboard on the sidewalk).

What we know about collage

The Forest is a profound experience for each child. 

Each year we consider a language for the children to express and document their time playing, learning, imagining, creating and absorbing the Forest. 

One of our intentions this year was to provide materials for collage as a  form of expression. We used loose material collage and paper collage during investigative research and also during story workshop. This language offers many affordances and can be liberating for young children with slowly developing fine motor skills. Mistakes which deepen understanding (and so encouraged) are easily remedied with collage.

As we worked with collage (below),  we acquired a shared framework for using it.. 

We discovered:

• Collage works best if you attend to the background of a picture first. 
• Smaller pieces of paper layered can provide dimension.
• Planning before working with collage is important but sketching small details on the paper to collage does not work.
• Using mixed media with collage(colored pencils, thinking pens) received mixed reviews. Some children thought it was distracting and detracted from their collage. 
• The details of the foreground---a tree, person, bridge---can be assembled and then glued in its entirety to the collage.

A few of our finished works of art