Sabot at Stony Point: A Letter to Our Mothers

Dear Mothers,

By now you have opened your Mother's Day Portraits. We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed watching the children create them.

It was a different kind of week: rainy every single day, and we were missing Sarah Anne, whose mother was in the hospital.

Sarah Anne and I have been teaching together so long that we have a routine for how to do these sweet portraits.

This year would be different.

I took a deep breath and sat down with the children at the beginning of the week and explained that we were going to create a special gift for our mothers. Their eyes lit up when they saw your photographs, and they struggled to wait for their turn to draw you, their beloved mamas. Almost without exception, they kissed your pictures before beginning to draw, and touched the various facial features with gentle fingers.

This is no small project. Not only did the children draw their mothers, they also created beads to go on top of the black-framed portraits and then wrapped the pictures in beautiful brown paper. Finally, flowers and raffia or ribbon are added for decoration. It really takes the entire week to assemble these gifts.

Here is an example of how the children worked together to support us while we had a substitute teacher in the classroom every day during this rainy week (because as luck would have it, I was out on Friday). At one point I was trying to hear a soft-spoken child tell me about her mother, while other children were in the block corner, loudly building with tools. I finally went over and explained how hard it was to hear, and asked if they would stop building for a few minutes. Then I went back over to the table and was soon deeply involved with writing the child's words. After several minutes, the block-builders called me over. "Is it okay for us to start building again now?" I assured them that it was, and was touched that they had waited so patiently, and checked in with me before commencing their work.