Portraits in Crayola.

The kids I work with took to drawing me the other day. The first one is actually what I was wearing that day. I don't know where the Queen of Hearts down there came from, but I love the expression on the last one. There's some dispute over my coloration, but that may be the available markers more than anything.

The Eric Carle Project

We read Eric Carle books all week, talked about the illustrations, and painted sheets of paper in different colors. Once the paint was dry, we cut out our shapes to make our zoo critters.

A bird.

A unicorn.

An owl.

A horse.

Ostriches.

A peacock.

This was my first real project in the new job and I think they did pretty well with it, being four years old and all.

Building Tomorrow's Bookworms Today

Here's one of the projects I worked on with the first graders. The whole point was to encourage them to read on their own, so my spiel was about how no matter what they were interested in, there was a book about it. While we waited to go to the library to find one, they got a piece of paper to fold to decorate a book about something they liked.

They came out pretty cute! I like The Werewolf That Lived in the Dark.

A Picture May Be Worth 1000 Words...

But being there is worth an easy billion.

Pictures never do justice to a hike through the woods. They show the colors, the light and the shadow, the little pieces, but not the whole picture. We hiked to the Cascades and there's so much to see and feel. We were asked why we would jaunt over hill and stone and up the stairs for four miles in the heat of July.

Pictures don't always explain and most people who ask that question don't care to hear about the smell of the river, wet rocks and moss, and black earth under dead leaves, or how laser intense the sun is through the trees and how it lights up the whole canopy like stained glass, or how the temperature drops to a chill you can feel in your belly when the path takes you between two huge stones, how the roots and the moss cushion and trip your feet, how the wind sounds like a tidal wave when it roars over the falls and down in to the valley around you, or any of the reasons that take me back out to the falls every summer.

John Bauer Artwork

The first time I saw a book illustrated by John Bauer I was so struck that all I could figure was that I had seen the artwork long ago or had dreamed it or something even more magical. See for yourself. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.

Remembering the Beauty of Things Set Aside

I read this again:


I keep forgetting how much I love it.





See?

I will never be able to watch this enough.

Seriously, it's awesome.