 |
|
|
 |
10 WAYS TO
CREATE A WORLD:
|
- Put together an art box filled with felt tips, paper, tape, scissors, paper punches, construction paper, etc. Set it in an easily reached place.
- Make an art table out of the dining room table. Cover it with plastic tablecloth (no one uses their dining rooms anyway).
- Make an outdoor box and fill it with Frisbees, sprinklers, ropes and pulleys, buckets, jump rope, and balls.
- String a skein of yarn all over the house or outdoors, up and down and around things. Tie a prize at the end of it.
- Make a tarp tent against a fence outdoors.
- Set up an easel in the backyard and provide plenty of paint and paper.
- Plant sunflowers and radishes. Both grow easily and well.
- Take chalk and make highways, rivers and towns on the driveway or sidewalk.
- Make a constellation for the bedroom out of cereal boxes. Punch holes at one end with a sharp pencil and shine a flashlight inside.
- Sleep under the stars and tell stories about the night sky.
|
|
|
NEW!
The Way from Here:
These essays and journal entries reflect the lurching, joyous process of raising four children. It is a place where terrible birthday parties are thrown, tempers are lost and found, and the ways of a child bring the whole world into perspective.
 Open Site |
I came to science, art, and craft project writing, not through any special courses or degrees in college, but through our four children. In 1987 I got a job writing the Mudpies column for Seattle’s Child magazine.
The ages of the children at that time ranged from 2 to 8 years old, and they were my testing ground for every activity. The sheer number of them, and their ages, restricted my range (so many little pairs of hands and restless energy!) but in the end, it worked in my favor. Most of the ac tivities I wrote about were great fun, but very simple. They were so simple, in fact, that the projects required very little adult supervision. Through this, I discovered that the most successful art and science projects, the ones that children love, that live beyond the time it takes to create, were those that surrendered all stages of the activity to the child. The more I interfered or ‘helped,’ no matter how wonderful the end product, the less interested my children were in doing them. They scattered, refused to participate, sighed and snorted and declared the project boring! The column absorbed these tenets cast by our children. Process is everything.
The column evolved. Books were born. Mudpies sprang from a mother, not a professional, and that is where the heart and soul of my writing lies.
|
|
