The Forest Room: Expanding Perceptions

This year's Umbrella Project centered around relationships.  We've brainstormed ways we might see relationships emerge in the classroom: relationships between children and their peers, children and teachers, children and nature, and children and materials.

I didn't think about those between parents and other parents' children.

Yet that is exactly the relationship that came to the fore at our last Parent Dialogue.

We invited parents to choose a wood sculpture made by a child not their own, and reinvent that work on a piece of black paper, using colored tape.

It's more challenging than it sounds!

The parents created beautiful works that spoke volumes about what they had seen in the three-year olds' pieces. They approached the task with compassion and reflection.



And then they took it a step further.

One parent chose to write a note to the child whose work he had studied.











When he read it aloud to the rest of us, we couldn't help but applaud, and then, not to be outdone, we all wrote notes to the artists who had inspired us.













 We left them up for the children to see the next day.









Each day we will be sharing one collaboration: a child's wood sculpture, the parent creation, and parent note at our circle.  The delight on the children's faces is palpable when they hear their personal note read to them.

                                                                                                   



"I believe that each of us must come to care about everyone else's children.

 

 We must come to see that the well-being of our own individual children is intimately linked to the well-being of all other people's children. 

     After all when one of our children needs life saving surgery, someone else's child will perform it;

 when one of our children is threatened or harmed by violence in the streets, someone else's child will inflict it. 

The good life for our own children can only be secured if it is also secured for all other people's children.

But to worry about all other people's children is not just a practical or strategic matter;

 it is an moral and ethical one; 

to strive for the well-being of all other people's children is also right."   

-Lilian Katz, Intellectual Emergencies: Some Reflections on Mothering and Teaching