Dance of the Sugarplum ISBNs

Last Saturday at the literacy workshop we played with Wikki Stix to form letters. Wikki Stix are basically pieces of yarn coated with colored wax. They have endless kids' craft uses, but I hadn't considered the teaching possibilities before. At the workshop we used Wikki Stix to form letters and numbers on a flat surface, then make crayon texture rubbings on paper over the formations. Wikki Stix adhere to the table unlike most texture rubbing craft materials, making it much easier for preschoolers.

The possibilities for creating animation and flip book sequences with the Wikki Stix rubbings really recharged my brain's dry cell battery. What if a marching band of red wiggler worms formed mutating numerals a football halftime show? With the Wikki Stix it was so easy to make incremental changes and produce quick rubbing images.

This Saturday I worked at the library preparing order forms for books, large print materials, and audio books. ISBN numbers danced around in my head like a proofreading nightmare version of "The Nutcracker".

International Standard Book Numbers used to be ten-digit identification codes that had a good beat you could almost dance to or type from memory. Now they are cursed thirteen-digit headaches that identify each individual media format for a particular title. As the day progressed, the ISBN numbers began to wiggle and shimmer, uncurl and travel when I tried to type, like enthused wax-dipped yarn dervishes. If they didn't all begin with 978, I would never have been able to corral them on paper!


The second edition of Mary Appelhof's Worms Eat My Garbage has just one ISBN:
9780977804511

Judith Viorst's new book, Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days, has all these ISBNs for various formats:
9781400105281
9781400135288
9781400155286
9781416550051

Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope has twice that many number assignments. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has thrice just in English. Form those numbers, my little red wigglers, between the yard markers and the hash marks.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

A Jarful of Marbles

Just wanted to write about a successful art project, but I was jarred by a bombardment of spelling and usage questions. The summer school elementary students are learning to play marbles, or at least how to use their thumbs to shoot taws at a cardboard box with openings cut to resemble a Firestone garage.

I love marbles, but I never played the game. We used marbles to play Chinese checkers. As kids we spent time sorting marbles by color and style in the same way we "played" with buttons and polished rocks. I have a big jar of old-timey marbles just because I like looking at it. So I took the jar to school for this week's art project.

Marbles fit in well with the preschoolers' unit on outer space. The kids thought the marbles looked like planets in the solar system. I had a photo of a very fancy marble with a solar system inside it. We also considered how gravity holds the marbles down to the bottom of the jar. What would happen if the jar was spilled in the space shuttle? It's plenty scary if the jar spills on Earth!

I had a lot of trouble writing about squirrels recently. When you write a word, and then look at it in several different sizes and fonts, it often starts to look improbable, if not impossible. Today I'm having that same difficulty with jar, jarful, and jar full. Is my glass jar full of marbles? Is it half empty? Is it a jarful? Or was a "jarful" one of the creatures described by Lewis Carroll?

jar (n.)
"cylindrical vessel," 1421, possibly from M.Fr. jarre "liquid measure" (smaller than a barrel), from Prov. jarra, from Arabic jarrah "earthen water vessel" (whence also Sp. jarra, It. giarra).

jar (v.)
to startle or unsettle; to shock or jolt




jarful (n.)
as much as a jar will hold

I don't want to get involved in the tussle between those who claim the nursery rhyme Ring Around the Roses refers to the Black Plague, and those who debunk their assertions. Putting posies in your pocket makes more sense than putting monkeys in a barrel, but is it a "pocketful of poseys" or a "pocket full of posies"? Both seem to be acceptable.

A tussle, of course, is a rough-and-tumble scuffle, but a tussock is a clump or tuft of growing grass, hair, or feathers. A tussock is closely related to Miss Muffet's tuffet, which was either a clump of grass or a low stool. My grandma Halma had a hassock, which my 1973 American Heritage Dictionary defines as "a thick cushion used as a footstool, or a dense clump of grass.

An earful (n.) doesn't have anything to do with either grass or wax:

1. An abundant or excessive amount of something heard, such as talk or music.
2. Gossip, especially of an intimate or scandalous nature.
3. A scolding or reprimand.

Getting an earful is different, and probably less effective, than having a grandma [with her feet upon a hassock] making the alveolar clicking interjection to exclaim her disapproval, disdain, contempt, or impatience. Tsk-tsk! For shame!

An anthem based on Psalm 98 from my old high school choir days is playing in my head ... Make a joyful noise*. Make a joyful jarful of marbles! These art works are by students ages four to eight.

The Holy Bible: King James Version. The Psalms 98
Praise for God's Righteousness
A Psalm.
1 O sing unto the LORD a new song;
for he hath done marvelous things:
his right hand, and his holy arm, hath gotten him the victory.
2 The LORD hath made known his salvation:
his righteousness hath he openly showed in the sight of the heathen.
3 He hath remembered his mercy and his truth
toward the house of Israel:
all the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God.
4 Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth:
make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.
5 Sing unto the LORD with the harp;
with the harp, and the voice of a psalm.
6 With trumpets and sound of cornet
make a joyful noise before the LORD, the King.
7 Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof;
the world, and they that dwell therein.
8 Let the floods clap their hands:
let the hills be joyful together
9 before the LORD;
for he cometh to judge the earth:
with righteousness shall he judge the world,
and the people with equity.

Supplies needed: Transparency sheets, crayons, glue sticks, colored cellophane, colored plastic shopping bags, giftwrap, scissors, construction paper scraps, some scraps of coffee filters painted with liquid watercolors.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Lunchbox gravity

This week I'm grateful to teach here on old feet-on-the-ground Mother Earth. As I begin to understand the complexities of dining in outer space, I'm so thankful not to have lunchroom duty on the space shuttle.

It's good to work in an environment where unzipping a lunchbox doesn't send Newton's red delicious apple floating about the room. And crumbs! Oh my gosh! Our newest preschoolers pulverized their Lunchable crackers and squooschy-mooosched the cheese slices. In space those cracker crumbs would be floating around the shuttle getting into vents, disabling sensitive equipment, and tickling astronauts' noses. I'll have nightmares about floating space cheese globs.

I hope making pretend space meal trays and pseudo-dehydrated food pouches has helped the children get an inkling about gravity. The project gave the kids a chance to practice fine-motor cutting and twisting skills. We exercised our pretending abilities when we launched our imaginary shuttle on a lunch mission. The project let me use some of the W.A.S.T.E. materials I've stockpiled, like plastic boxes, mylar ziplock pouches, and blue spongy packing sheets.

All those Capri Sun juice pouches in Earth kids' lunchboxes seem ready for blast-off. Our school just discovered the TerraCycle website, and we're considering enlisting in the Drink Pouch Brigade. TerraCycle produces new office supplies from collected empty drink pouches.

Click here for info about food in space. I hope the astronauts are tidy lunchers. O, say can you say your PB&J won't float away?

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Cat's pajamas and bee's knees bedrooms

This bedroom with tape-player is by a five year old girl. She has good taste in drawer pulls! The one below is by a five year old boy.



After our "Cat's Pajamas" art class, one girl came to school in her kitty cat pajamas for Crazy Day, and another wore a pink leopard hat. Other kids had some outfits that were truly the fish's galoshes.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Three-cornered cats

By a four year old boy.
© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Great blooming blue-haired mommies!

I love the hairdos on the Mommy Seed packets. Now you can grow your own blue-haired mommy. You can even plant gray helmet hair. This next one looks like Donna Reed Show 1958 tv hair.









Cultivating real mommies is trickier than drawing mommy hair. Those thoughts will be in a future blog. Best wishes this Mother's Day weekend to all mommies and gardeners!


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Pointy Pontiff Ears

"Why are the kindergarten students wearing Pope hats," I asked Dad. We were driving to the drugstore just as the morning kids were being dismissed for the Easter spring break.




Something had gone wrong with the traditional bunny ears craft project, and the teacher has my complete sympathy. We never know when an art project will go just that little bit off course! It might just be a scissor's whisker's mistake in the cutting of pointy ears with those round-tip Fiskars.

I didn't have a student available, so my zebra hand puppet is modeling the mitre and bunny ears. The Eastridge kindergarten kids were parading proudly out of school wearing their bunny ears on sideways. I didn't have my camera, and certainly wouldn't have snapped a photo, but I sure wish I could capture that image.

That brings me to the vocabulary word for the today:

rotogravure
1913, from Ger. Rotogravur (originally, in full, Deutsche Tiefdrück Gesellschaft), said to blend two corporate names, Rotophot and Deutsche Photogravur A.G. Etymologically, the roots are L. rota "wheel, roller" and Fr. gravure "engraving." The process was used for printing photo sections of newpapers and magazines, so that the word came to be used for these.

I won't begin to try to define the terms for "papal headgear". It's a crossword clue that appears often, and the choices are usually mitre or tiara.

And now for the sing-along, brought to you by the makers of bright foil-covered chocolate eggs and pastel plastic grass:

"Easter Bonnet"

In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,

You'll be the grandest lady in the Easter Parade.

I'll be all in clover and when they look you over,

I'll be the proudest fellow in the Easter Parade.

On the avenue, Fifth Avenue,

the photographers will snap us,

And you'll find that you're in the rotogravure.

Oh, I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet,

And of the girl I'm taking to the Easter Parade.

Written by Irving Berlin

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Life Imitates Art Class

Set up twenty-seven worm bins today. One was real, and the rest were a pretend play art project for the preschoolers. Our class started a worm bin in January. This art project let kids review what we have learned about worms so far, and practice the vocabulary for fine motor manipulations and spatial relationships.

I seem to buy a package of mushrooms nearly every week, so I had lots of blue styrofoam packages resembling the class Rubbermaid storage container worm bin.

• POKE--Each student poked airholes in pretend worm bin with a marshmallow-roasting skewer under intensely supervised conditions.
• TEAR--We tore newspaper strips for bedding in the bin, then brown paper for soggy fall leaves, and pale green paper for lettuce.
• SQUEEZE--We pretended to wring the water out of our newspaper strips the way we did the real worm bin bedding (to the consistency of a damp sponge).
• ADD--Maroon yarn for "red wigglers".
• CRUMPLE--To make our "lettuce" texture.
• CUT--Construction paper "carrots" and "celery" to worm size bits.
• PEEL--Worms love banana peels, so we pretended to peel and eat a banana, then added the yellow paper banana skin to the bin.
• DIG--With our garden spoon we dug a hole in the bedding to bury our kitchen waste.
• LIFT--We gently lifted the vermicompost, but didn't stir it. We didn't want it to flip out of the bin on our pretend carpet!
• TURN OVER--We turned over the compost with our spoons.
• COVER--Because worms don't like light, and teachers don't like escapees.
• CARRY CAREFULLY--The preschoolers were so into the imaginary play that they took more careful steps than they usually do when carrying their cup of juice to the table for snack.

The most difficult part of this day was getting the kids to stand up and push their chairs in before picking up their worm bins. I wonder how Miss Nancy on Romper Room got the children to do it so well. Maybe after worm art it will be time for Do-Bees.

When I got home my own mail-order worms had arrived. Just so you can imagine, a 6" x 7" x 7" box contains one pound of worms, or about one thousand of the little eaters.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Cross-Dressing Ostrich Does Charleston

If you look awhile at the little students' art you begin to see a storyline for the ostriches. The birds start off cautiously, and one surreptitiously hikes up his sagging pantyhose.


They settle into the march, ready to go a long distance over the parched grassland of Africa.


Some are afraid of their shadows. Others are more bold and confident.


Getting up to full stride, one runs like crazy. Others do chest bumps, endzone victory displays, and the knee-swapping move of the Charleston.

Male ostriches have black and white feathers. Females have brown and gray. All of them have fabulous long eyelashes.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Valentine Hummingbirds

Our preschool art project this week was making drawings of hummingbirds flying around and sipping nectar from bright red flowers. It isn't hummingbird weather here in North Texas, but it was a good excuse to practice drawing Valentine hearts to make the red flowers hummingbirds love.

It's not snowman weather, either, but the kids loved the idea of starting their hummingbird with a green snowman. I'd love to say I thought that up all by myself, but I got the idea from Drago Art online. What I didn't anticipate was how alive the birds would seem in the kids' drawings. You can almost see the blur of the fast-beating wings!

Prior to the drawing class, I shared three books with the children:

• A Hummingbird's Life, by John Himmelman.
• Little Green, by Keith Baker.
• The Hungry Hummingbird, by April Pulley Sayre .

The preschoolers are still excited about hummingbirds, and the elementary students caught the fever, too. They are drawing imaginative and colorful hummingbird pictures in their free time. I can't show any of those, as the kids took them home to give to their mommies. Bet they are gracing lots of refrigerators!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Green-feathered friends

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Birds, Squirrels, and God's Little Lice

What to name the two groups of children for preschool art class? A new semester means shuffling the groups as a few kids moved up to elementary class, and we have some new students. Because most of the children aren't readers, we post a symbol for each group with photos of the students in that group.

Last semester we had the Color Wheel Group and the Baked Potato Group. That's because everybody can draw a potato. Even the preschoolers who say, "I can't...," or, "it's too hard," agree that a potato is easy to draw.

When you break things down to the simplest part, the baked potato, drawing gets easier. That's my philosophy of life--find the baked potato, then take the decisions as butter or sour cream instead of life and death. It's warm, satisfying, simple, and sure takes away fear of failure.

Now it is time for new groups and symbols. Shirts and Skins won't do! Neither will Curly Fries and Hash Browns.

My dad told a memorable tale of his Pierce Congregational Sunday School class back in the late-1920s. His group was named "God's Little Lights" as opposed to "God's Little Lambs". Of course, the kids referred to themselves as "God's Little Lice". This story was recalled when the first President Bush used the slogan, "a thousand points of light." Now I remember "God's Little Lice" every time we have a case of head lice at school.

"Head lice" are two words teachers dread even more than "pink eye". Head lice are equal opportunity vermin, and no school is spared. By the time every child's scalp is inspected, most teachers feel itchy all over! I've been having waves of psychosomatic itchiness at a thousand points of lice for several days now. Oh, the power of suggestion!

No, no, no. We can't name the art groups The Head Lice and The Pink Eyes! That will never do. How about calling them the Birds and the Squirrels?

And so, I have out my copy of Everyday Doings At Home this evening, looking at Mother, Bobby, and Bettie Squirrel. My schoolteacher great-auntie Em used this book to teach courtesy on weekdays to the same kids who were "God's Little Lice" on Sundays. Kids haven't changed all that much in the past eighty years. I bet Auntie Em had her occasional thousand points of itchiness, too!





© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

His boy Elroy

Got a big bag of Jetson spacemobiles ready to zip off to Spacely Sprockets! My dear Loofah Goat Lady (LGL) has saved up a bunch of Desert Glory/Nature Sweet cherry tomato containers for my art classes.



I always try to avert my eyes from the cherry tomato section of produce in my Albertsons grocery store, because I might drift off into a long fantasy, especially after a day with the preschoolers. The containers are so obviously the creation of a person who watched lots of Jetsons cartoons back in the Sixties and never recovered.

Not having a George Jetson finger puppet in my teaching aids drawer, I present a wind-up penguin to ride in the spacemobile. The penguin is glad to not be a Peep. Those eerie supersweet botox Easter chicks could ride in spacemobiles to their date with the microwave, or to Disneyland for a spin on the classic Mad Hatter's Tea Party ride of giant cups and saucers.

In a more Seventies frame of mind, the tomato containers remind me of restaurant all-you-can-eat salad bar "sneeze guards". The lids would make fine Jello brain molds for Igor's Young Frankenstein Ab Normal scene.


What will my students do with their tomato spacemobiles? It may take a few months before we know!

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Our show of shows

Spring Festival had a Caribbean theme this year. While the music teacher taught the little kids to sing "Day-oh" and to act out a story about a cat and a copycat rat, I helped them make little island dioramas and read one of my favorite books, Rata-Pata-Scata-Fata. The elementary teacher made a beach backdrop.

The little island dioramas needed some people or other characters to complete the scene. The preschoolers loved drawing the rat and cat from the festival story. They got excited drawing the boy and his goat from Rata-Pata-Scata-Fata. Best of all, they loved drawing themselves, their classmates, and the music teacher performing on stage. They dictated descriptions for each character they drew.



We scanned the drawings so the pictures can be made into a book. We cut apart their drawings, and laminated them, then glued each figure to a cork so it stands up. We get the corks from a helpful restaurant. Now each child will have a little set of their own characters to play with on the diorama stage. They can sing their festival songs until next year's Spring Festival, and be the narrator for their stories.



This kind of play is so important for developing imagination and vocabulary, and for understanding story structure. I feel sad when the little kids talk about getting to "lebel eleben" on their bideo games as they go shooting around the playground. Please let your kids and grandkids have lots of time for imaginative, dramatic play and creating their own stories, songs, and toys.



© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

No z-z-z-z-z for these bees

Some mornings we don't want to climb out from under our quilts to get the day going, right? It helps if we have had enough sleep. Elementary age students need nine hours of sleep under their warm and comfy quilts to really concentrate and learn at school in the daytime. Preschool students need ten or eleven hours. Moms need a solid twelve but that will happen when pigs fly. Art teachers are still trying to catch up from when their own sons were little.

Being The Bedtime Enforcer is tough and rarely applauded duty. No parent wants to be the consistent bedtime villain, but teachers silently salute your efforts. Well-rested children are focused, inquisitive, conscientious, polite, and imaginative. They are the kids who make it worth throwing off our comfy quilt, starting the Mr. Coffee, and heading to the shower in the morning.

We have been playing with the word "bee" during our quilt art project as we piece together many art techniques to create some fine collages. The quilting bee is a symbol of collaboration and community. Bees are just fabulous creatures, and so easy to draw since they look like flying hotdogs with stripes!

My preschool children are insistent that bees "stink". They claim all bees have "stinkers" on their tails. I'll be planning an art project with lots of G forces next, as I, in my apparently delusional grown-up teacher state, thought bees had "stingers".

Alas, it isn't the bees that stink. You ain't smelled nothin' until you've opened a vintage bottle of overly warm Chateau de Elmer's . When you reach to the back of the art supply shelf scary things await. They may remind you of the stink of the 1968 Heidi Bowl, a vivid memory of my childhood:

Trivia: This was the TV adaptation of "Heidi" that, through no fault of its own, became embroiled in a U.S. broadcasting brouhaha known to this day as the "Heidi Bowl." On Sunday, 17 Nov 1968, the NBC television network was scheduled to begin airing "Heidi" at 7pm Eastern Standard Time, following coverage of an American Football League game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. The game ran long; however, with the Jets leading the Raiders, 32-to-29, NBC broke away to begin "Heidi" on schedule. During the remaining minute of play (which was extended by penalties and timeouts), Oakland managed to score two touchdowns, and ended up beating New York, 43-to-32. Outraged football fans inundated NBC switchboards. The network expressed regret, saying it had intended to stay with the football game until it ended, and blaming a series of miscommunications for the gaffe. A result of this fiasco is that NFL television contracts require games to be televised in their entirety.

My father tells stories of the Great Depression. As a young boy he learned that the best way to get a delicious lunch in the dusty Thirties was to hang around the ladies making quilts. I just hope they won't serve cottage cheese.

December

This was an incredibly beautiful sunset in Lincoln, where there is no snow.
This was a pretty strange day in Plano, Texas, where there is.

These are delightful penguins at the South Pole, by students age 3-8.

This is not a sleeping polar bear at the North Pole.It is a 1991 300 ZX in need of many expensive repairs before it becomes driveable, so it's basically hibernating.

A Lesson in Symmetry

When I was in preschool, shortly after the Civil War, we dipped a piece of yarn tied onto the end of a pencil into a metal juice can* of tempera paint**. Then we flopped the yarn on one half of a folded piece of construction paper. We lifted the yarn away, then folded the paper closed and rubbed it. I still remember the surprise of opening the paper and finding the painted squiggle on both halves of the paper.

Since children don't use that edible paste these days, that first surprise of symmetry might be one of the most common art experiences across generations. The other would be the first clay snowman.

Today a student found a way to take the symmetry lesson to the next level. We are studying prints, making styrofoam, texture, mono-, sponge and spatula prints. We were taking turns printing circles of different sizes using yogurt, oleo, cottage cheese, and snack pudding containers. This lad was so pleased to find that the red circle he made on one half of the paper now appeared on both sides that he put the paper on his head like a tent. And, yes, he had very symmetrical bright red circles on each side of his little blond head.

O O

*Frozen OJ came in metal cans that had to be opened with a can opener. The cans were just the right size to fit in the paint tray of our school easels.

**It was powdered tempera mixed with water, and either runny or lumpy.

Ms. Wednesday

On Monday my students told me that they knew about another Ms. Nancy. "He's a spider, and he plays tricks," they said. It's true. Anansi the spider is a trickster of African folktales. I am sometimes a trickster of art classes, and have been known to teach spiderweb weaving projects. I only have two legs, though.

On Tuesday my students told me my name was Ms. Wednesday. It had never occurred to me how similar that sounds. I kind of like it. It's not as racy as Miss November, or as literary as the new novels about Thursday Next, but it's fun.

On Wednesday a student told me he knew another Ms. Nancy. "She is my French teacher, and she is really old, just like you." Great. You can see why I prefer being Ms. Wednesday! I also like it when a parent nudges his child and says in a stage whisper, "Look! It's Ms. Nancy, the craziest art teacher on the planet!" Boy, that makes my day.

Perhaps inspired by the woman I watched doing Tai Chi exercises on the lawn of the Santa Fe Post Office, I've been teaching line lessons through movements that are a mix of pantomime and modern dance. My goal is to impress on the kids the importance of using one hand to hold their paper on the table while they use the other hand to draw big, strong lines. I'm teaching them that pulled lines are stronger than pushed lines, that little snail lines only need our hands and fingers, but big whale lines need our whole arm and shoulder, and some hip-hop hiccup mountain lines (not to be confused with mountain lions) need us to move us our hips, knees and ankles. My knees and ankles haven't moved this way since I practiced tae kwon do side kicks with my boys when they were pretty little. It's been fun and effective. The kids are all game to mimic that old lady, Ms. Wednesday. They are all getting the idea of holding the paper in place while drawing. I believe occupational therapists call that a bilateral skill--your left hand isn't doing what your right hand is doing. If these little kids can get this skill by mimicking me doing a silly dance, it is worth it. But after Day Three I can barely move! Don't ask me to do the limbo.

Over-working

I am reading through nearly thirty-year-old notes written in Professor Butt's classes. Some are written in Ebony pencil on brown paper towels from the classroom dispenser. Others are written in ink on scraps of quality drawing papers. All are loaded with memories.

"Stop your work when you don't have to do anything else: don't do all that you want to do to it. Pull off prior to compulsive/therapeutic!"

Often parents of my little preschoolers ask me if little Buffy or Skippy will ever paint anything besides edge-to-edge swoops of mud. I try to explain that their child had a pretty fierce T-Rex in that painting at one point, but the enjoyment of the tactile experience of painting eventually submerged the T-Rex. The tactile experience is developmentally important. Then I explain that my professors told me that getting a student to stop work on a painting was the most difficult lesson of all. Sometimes I can smell Mr. Butt's cigar when I give this little speech.