Beach Bums

Talk about a low-budget beach vacation on less than a tank of gas, how about these student art works? Got it in my head that it was time to use up some very old and faded construction paper, odd-sized cut pieces of paper, stubby crayons, and past-their-prime markers. As these things happen, I'd also saved up just enough styrofoam meat trays to do some print-making when I received a big bag of heavily-scented seashells meant for a bathroom potpourri.


Student, age 3

In the first class session we made crayon texture rubbings of the flattest shells. We looked at shells to find spirals, and drew white crayon spirals. Then we imagined the waves coming onto the sandy beach and receding, using arm movements, inhaling, and exhaling. We talked about the gentle curves of waves, and drew them with the old markers, then traced them with wet paintbrushes. Last, we used some diluted blue glitter paint over our crayon rubbings and spirals.


Student, age 5

In the second class session we used some foam paint stamps of sea creatures, and cut a bit of seaweed. We drew some fish, too.

Older kids observed and drew seashells with pencil, and then drew into the styrofoam pieces. We made marker prints by coloring the styrofoam with washable markers, then printing them onto damp construction paper.

I always love styrofoam marker print projects because almost all kids can use the same technique with materials they have at home. For the seashell project, it gets even better when we start using the styrofoam plates with washable white printing ink. The ink picks up the traces of marker colors left on the styrofoam, and gives the prints a perfect shell quality and color. And the final addition to the art work is gluing the styrofoam print plate onto the paper.


Styrofoam plate, lower left. Marker print, upper right. Student, age 6



That's the closest I'll get to a barefoot walk down the beach this summer, but it was very relaxing and successful.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Blooming mommies

Growing blooming mommies can be done easily in most home gardens with the proper cultivation techniques. The preschool students love the idea of a blooming mommy with flowers growing out of her head. Today they each made a portrait of their own blooming mommy on the seed packets for our special Mommy Seeds.

The Mother's Day projects are nearing completion. Like the Little Red Hen, the preschoolers grew the plants last summer, collected the seeds last fall, saved the plastic applesauce containers from their lunches this winter, drilled holes in the containers this spring, then filled them with potting soil, planted the seeds for the flowers, and marked the flowers with plant stakes. The Mommy Seed packets are the Mother's Day cards to accompany the gift of flowers.

The children are learning about cultivation, which they define as "taking care of the things we plant". At the same time, the children are being cultivated.

I've spread out my old American Heritage Dictionary, turned to cultivate and cultivation. Preschool is all about forming, refining, educating, fostering, and nurturing. To educate, we improve and prepare, plow and fertilize, tend and till.

Cultivation can also mean "socialization through training and education to develop one's mind or manners". Preschool is a never-ending battle for acculturation, which is "the adoption of the behavior patterns and norms of the surrounding culture". We aren't talking about diversity and multicultural awareness here. That is the territory of my eldest son working with university students. We are talking about not picking noses in public, and remembering to flush the toilet, the behavioral norms of the surrounding population of human beings! It's often a harrowing experience.

Till means to prepare for the raising of crops by plowing, harrowing, and fertilizing. It means to work at, to labor. It is definitely hard work to get preschoolers to stop picking their noses and start flushing the toilet. The word "till" seems to carry the frustrations of hundreds of generations of farmers on its back.

My young sons each went through a John Deere phase of fascination with farm implements. As a MOBO, I excelled in the choo-choo railroad fascination phase, and performed bravely in the truck stop big rig phase. I could identify every Matchbox car pulled from the three-gallon tub by year, model, and color. I really knew my hook-and-ladder trucks in the firefighter stage. I was damn tolerant in the military vehicle phase, if I do say so myself, waiting out G.I. Joe. I was never very good at farm implements, aircraft ID, or motorcycles, though. If I crammed for the test I could pass, but I never retained the information!

Harrowing experiences sometimes require using a plunger instead of a farm implement. A harrow is used to break and level plowed ground. It's a farm implement with heavy disks and teeth. To harrow is to inflict great distress or torment on the mind. Or perhaps on the foot. My mom used to receive an annual Christmas letter from an old high school chum. The best year the letter recounted the farmer dropping a sharp harrow upon his foot, but having to pull the harrow teeth out of the punctured foot so he could drive himself to the regional hospital because his wife couldn't shift gears on the manual transmission pick-up truck.

Sometimes on the commute home from work I chant, "It was a tough day, but at least I didn't drop the harrow on my foot." Being a mommy is a tough job, too. There were a lot of days when I felt I'd dropped the harrow on my foot as a parent. The most difficult years were those when I felt unable to shift gears.

Fortunately, there were many more days when I felt like flowers were blooming out of my head!


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

I say flamingo, you say flamango

Montessori teachers and Scrabble junkies just can't help it. We see a group of movable letters, and we have to make new words. The sign originally had birthday wishes for the recipient of the shocking flamingo flocking, "WE FLEW IN FOR ____'S B'DAY".

A movable alphabet

The children were thrilled to find a pink flamingo flock in front of the school when they arrived. Some really believed the flamingos flew to school. Some fell in love!

A few plastic flamingos migrated from the front lawn to the playground. One preschooler wrapped her arms around a bird's neck and proclaimed, "mingo baby mine!"

The second morning we rearranged the sign letters to spell, "WE BIRDS PLAY NOW". We fixed a group of plastic birds inside a sparkly hula hoop. Plans to have jump-roping flamingos met technical difficulties.

"Mingos play!," the preschooler shrieked with glee. Usually we worry about baby birds imprinting on human rescuers. This time we were concerned that our little student had imprinted on the plastic flamingo. Would she be distraught when the birthday birds were collected by the rent-a-flock folks?

We didn't get a chance to arrange FLY BIRDS NOW on the sign this morning before the plastic flamingos were gone. Heading out to the playground for a session digging in the garden dirt, the preschooler lamented, "mangos gone, mangos gone". So sad, so sad. Mango must be the past tense of flamingo.

My sons never fell into a zoo flamingo lagoon, not even Danger Baby. Quite surprising, come to think of it. They had no accidental close-up encounters with roseate spoonbills or scarlet ibis in any aviary either. We were lucky to live near good zoos when the boys were little, and to receive family zoo memberships from generous grandparents so we could visit often.



The boys drew many maps of the zoos they knew so well in Omaha, Oklahoma City, and Dallas. They also designed some fantasy zoos based on their preferences and the need for frequent pit stops. They knew to put the picniks by the Aveary, Ellafuts, and Zeberas, but not too far from the rest rooms. The KagaRoos and Crokadils and Pigs should definitely be close to the Gift Shop (and more rest rooms)!



The Mingos and Mangos should be placed close to the playground and petting zoo! Should you need to draw a flamingo, the recipe is raindrop+S+4. Try blending purple, red, orange, and white with your pink for feather variations.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Single dips and double jugheads

It isn't easy learning to draw and cut Valentine hearts. I'm surprised I don't remember learning it as a kid. I have such vivid memories of learning to draw houses and people, to zip my jacket, to swallow pills, to stop a nosebleed, to avoid brussel sprouts, to climb a tree, and to spell y-o-u, l-o-o-k, and r-e-d.

My lead teacher makes Valentine hearts using the Department of Motor Vehicles method. Imagine finding your one true love in the line to renew your drivers license. Some enchanted afternoon in a crowded civic buildng smelling of dried roaches, repressed cigarette smokers, and mildewed corrugated cardboard you would have plenty of time to get acquainted, and possibly create little Yugos. It's the inspirational stuff of Rogers and Hammerstein!

m + v = heart

Somewhere in the last couple decades I began teaching kids the Baskin Robbins method of drawing and cutting out Valentine hearts. A heart is really just a cheap date for teenagers too young to barhop. They are sharing two dips of strawberry ice cream in sugar waffle cones. This is the best method for drawing along a fold of colored paper before cutting.

(cone + dip) x 2 = heart



My tulips are thine.

Puns are an essential part of any school Valentine celebration. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that zing!

Two ears are better than two lips for drawing hearts. An amphora is a two-handled Greek vase, generally with a swollen belly, narrow neck, and a large mouth. Sometimes the vase had a pointed bottom.


Jughead is a recurring character in the Archie comic books about Riverdale High School. Girls didn't seem as interested in comic books as boys when I was a pre-adolescent. I bought my Archie and Millie the Model comic books in the sunshiny front window of the Rex-All drugstore in Pierce, Nebraska. In those days of Twiggy and Yardley, I learned to draw Valentine hearts inspired by Jughead's ears.



© 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

J p O x

Looks like I fell asleep with my head on the keyboard, but it was actually a very successful drawing project for the preschool and elementary students. Driving home at six o'clock Monday, I was admiring the winter sunset of dusty lavendars, pinks, and smoky blues. Against that background the traffic lights were glowing red or green. At each stop the birds were coming to roost on the telephone wires. They were twittering in such a loud, large chorus as to overpower my car radio. It was so loud I couldn't even think.

Ah. Those moments when we can't even think are often the best for receiving inspirations. Arriving home, I checked my favorite blogs. Randel Plowman had posted this collage of band-aids and telephone wires:


I check Plowman's A Collage A Day blog for visual refueling several times a week.

No time to take photos of birds on the wires above the Walgreens parking lot across the way, and nothing right in my files, so I had to search online to prepare for my class. When I showed the students a photo, they clamored, "I've been there! I've been there!" Probably not, since it came from Britain. It's a copyrighted photo, so I won't put it in the blog, but if you follow the link and click through the slideshow you'll probably say, "I've been there," too. Birds crowd a crisscross of power lines in this bane of any urban business owners with lighted parking lots. The birds are loud and frequently messy, but they are NATURE to a child riding in a safety carseat and looking out the SUV window.

My goal is to help children become noticers and observers of their environment, as much as it is to draw or mix paints. It's nice to study meerkats and marsupials, but kids need a connection to the nature right here at home. If I can get them to notice starlings and grackles crowding onto a telephone wire, maybe they will catch sight of a cardinal on a bare branch some cold morning, or a mockingbird singing atop a chimney. If they look up they may feel privileged to see the aerobatic ballet of a scissortailed flycatcher or pause to note the red-tailed hawk surveying her world from the top of a power pole:



Much of the art project was a directed drawing, meaning that I drew samples to be copied. We were drawing birds on a wire, but using letters to begin our birds. Directed drawings help kids feel competent and confident to get started on a picture. I always build in opportunities for students' own creative additions.



J is for making jays and other birds with crests.

p is for birds who perch like the class parakeets.


O is for sleepy birds with their feathers all puffed up against the cold.


x is for a grumpy purple martin who doesn't want to be crowded.




[Is this one an opera libretto or a Looney Tune?]

We made our telephone wires by drawing a line across a sheet of colored letter-size paper, then cutting along the line. I still remember the awe I felt the first time I was shown how to slide the cut pieces apart to create a line against a black background paper. Right now I'm looking out my window at three power lines glowing flamingo pink in the late sunshine against a pale blue sky. To me the blue sky paper must have been cut and slid to let the pink paper show! You can imagine how I perceive jet contrails.



© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Wine, dine, and fine lines

This is a favorite story of mine, but sometimes I need to cite my source, Ohioana Authors, for the unbelievers.

Robert McCloskey

His second and perhaps best-known book, Make Way for Ducklings, won the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1942. In the story, a mother duck searches the streets of Boston for a safe place to raise her young. McCloskey began the book by recalling the hilarious scenes of ducks crossing grid-locked Boston streets. To illustrate the detailed movements of his characters with authenticity, McCloskey bought a half dozen southern mallards at a city market from a poultry dealer. He spent the next few weeks crawling around his studio, sketching the ducks and cleaning up their droppings. McCloskey put them in a bathtub to sketch their swimming movements. And when they waddled too fast for him to draw, McCloskey fed the ducks red wine to slow them down. Evident from the richly detailed charcoal illustrations, McCloskey returned to Boston to sketch the book’s background alive with parks, bridges, fences, streets, people and cars.

http://www.ohioana-authors.org/mccloskey/highlights.php

Don't let the class rabbit get any ideas!



© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Brain Hair

I was jumping through flaming hoops trying to get the preschoolers to tell me the difference between lions and tigers after we looked at photos. I really just needed one student to tell all of us that tigers have stripes, or even "stwipes," but it wasn't happening. We looked at more photos. One student piped up that daddy lions have "brain hair," and they all nodded in agreement.

Growling engines and forgetful minstrels

My feverish naps have recalled a strange memory of a childhood illness. I must have been home from school several days already, because I'd improved enough to get out of bed and move to the green sectional sofa to watch the tiny black and white t.v. There wasn't much on in the daytime in the early Sixties, and being allowed to watch was a real oddity.

I'll never forget Bing Crosby forgetting his lit pipe backstage, and burning the theatre down. Not just once. Several times. Until the miraculous age of Google, I couldn't be sure if this old memory was real or a fever, but I worried a great deal about fires for years afterward. Now I know the movie was "Dixie", a 1943 musical biopic of the Old South, and the subject of an article in the Spring 2004 Journal of Popular Film and Television, by Michael Dunne:


Abstract: In Mississippi (1935) and Dixie (1943), the wildly successful Bing Crosby acts, croons, and clowns--in and out of blackface--in Southern roles that exemplify the unquestioned racism as well as the imaginative escapism that characterized other highly successful popular cultural artifacts of the era....

...Dixie is, at once, a musical biography, a narrative romance, and a Hollywood musical. As biography, the film has been justifiably indicted as inaccurate. Daniel Decatur Emmett was actually a native of Mount Vernon, Ohio, and he first successfully performed "Dixie" at the Bowery Amphitheater in New York City on February 6, 1843. (10) For reasons of narrative effect, most of these facts were changed in Dixie. As Michael Rogin points out, for example, "To hide minstrelsy's roots in northern, proslavery idealizations of the South, which it was repeating, Paramount moved Dan Emmett from New York to New Orleans for Dixie" (179). Furthermore, the plot provides Emmett's character with a behavioral forgetfulness about laying down his still-smoking pipes to set up the finale in which his debut performance of the tune "Dixie" in New Orleans must be speeded up to its current lively tempo because his discarded pipe has set the backstage on fire. To develop this narrative thread, Emmett accidentally burns down the family home of his fiancee early in the film, and later Millie Cook barely avoids another disastrous fire when she snatches up Emmett's smoldering pipe in the theatrical boarding house that she runs with her father in New Orleans. Not too long after this, Emmett's discarded pipe destroys the theater in which his new minstrel act is on its way to becoming a phenomenal success. As so often is the case in musical biopics, the available historical facts are subsumed by the narrative exigencies of the genre. (11)

I bring this up partly because of new feverish images, and partly because we adults forget the power of media impressions on young children. I don't know what understanding I had at that age of the Civil Rights movement then sweeping the U.S. I was too concerned about forgetful pipe-smokers to align the Hollywood minstrel romanticism with Life Magazine realities of racism. Afterall, I was only seven. Maybe I obsessed about fire because that was the only worry from the movie that I could even put a name to.

On a much lighter note, I read in the New York Times, Their Motorcycles Are in the Mail, that the Postal Service is releasing a new commemorative stamp set on Monday. The motorcycle stamps are groovy!



I'm a Collage Mama, not a Motorcycle Mama. I've ridden a motorcycle three times in my life. Motorcycles have different associations for me. My son collected some detailed cycle miniatures about ten years ago. At times, I have used the tiny cycles for a drawing project. Kids are as intrigued as I am with the cycles. They've been willing to observe them closely to make excellent drawings, and have respected the rule not to touch. Each time I've explained that the mini motorcycles belong to my son. Then I've showed the kids a photo of my three sons all grown up and dressed in suits. They are always amazed that I have sons, or so I've thought. Maybe they are amazed that I have sons so tiny they can ride the miniature motorcycles! Can you say "Tom Thumb?"

One time I brought the cycles back home after a strenuous drawing class, and left them on the dining table. After a few weeks, the cycles made it to the window sill. Now the cycles on the windows are a sign to friends, letting them know that they've found the right condo in the complex. If you get up to the front door, and don't see the motorcycles, you are at the wrong place!

Waiting for Van Gogh

Did you know Godot is French for cold front? I didn't either, although I've been waiting and waiting and spinning coins with Rosencrantz and Goldenstern. The cold front took its time getting to Dallas as I spent the week teaching about Van Gogh's sunflower paintings. My students looked for similarities and differences in the flowers in our vases. They gave me a wonderful gift of variety in their art. Please enjoy!


The cold front finally arrived and it feels so great! Perfect weather for watching butterflies on my flowers, and for getting caught up. Friends, flowers, focus, fair weather. Fantastic!