A Child and a Doll
The most iconic of toys is the doll—it's survived for centuries and taken on numerous forms. Even when a child doesn't have one they will often make a doll for themselves out of natural materials. When I think about the "toys of the season" in the past, what comes to mind are the rushes at shopping chains for dolls every holiday season from Cabbage Patch Kids in 1983, to Beanie Bears in 1995, to Hatchimals last year. Over half of the "sell out" toys since 1983 were dolls. Most other best selling toys consisted of technology: play consoles, tablets etc. Only three other toys since 1983 were in another category (the Koosh Ball in 1987, a Razor Scooter in 2000, and Beyblades in 2002).
The theme of a child taking care of his/her friend runs through children's literature—a child in a deep relationship with a doll (Corduroy, The Velveteen Rabbit, Knuffle Bunny), an animal (Winnie the Pooh, Curious George), or other types of friends (Puff, the Magic Dragon, The Giving Tree, When the Moon Forgot).
Ollie's Odyssey
I was asked by The Learning Alliance and The Indian River School District in Florida to design a K-12 professional development experience for teachers around the Performance Cycle. Over the course of the year the theme for our professional development had been "The Hero's Journey." I knew I wanted to work with the opening lines of The Odyssey for the middle and high school teachers (a text I'd worked with before—see one of my previous posts here). I thought maybe I could lead the same experience for elementary, but I woke up in the middle of the night knowing that, especially for K-2 grade teachers, it wouldn't work.
Thinking about The Odyssey, I grabbed a book off my daughter's bookshelf Ollie's Odyssey.
Since I was teaching the opening of The Odyssey in the secondary workshops, I thought it might be interesting to focus for elementary teachers on the first chapter, "Lost and Found," where a young boy, Billie is born with a hole in his heart. His parents wonder, "Billy has a hole in his heart. Will he be all right? He must be." His mother sews a doll for him,
It looked like a teddy bear, but for reasons that Billy's mother could not explain, she had also given it long ears that were vaguely rabbit-like. So it wasn't really a bear or a rabbit; it was something all its own.
At the end of the chapter we find out that Billy will be just fine. As he wakes up, his doll, Ollie, awakens to the world as well.
Hands and Intelligence
In our work with The Learning Alliance, we've been increasingly exploring the idea of maker or studio spaces within classrooms. Maria Montessori writes that "the hands are the instruments of man's intelligence." Our students in schools, of every age group, have much too little time to make things with their hands. Time is taken up with testing, preparing for testing, remedial reading approaches, computer-based assessment programs (like i-Ready where students are essentially filling out worksheets on a computer). If what Montessori says is true, then our students are getting less intelligent day-by-day in most of our schools.
I wanted to create a hands-on, maker experience for the teachers. Many of the teachers at the elementary school level organize their classrooms around Learning Centers—spaces where students can work, often independently, on various projects. When visiting schools, one of the issues I'd seen with many centers is that they are not connected to the rest of the curriculum. There will often be one center where a teacher is reading a book with students (and often not a very rich book), another where students are working on worksheet-related tasks, and another where they are working on literacy programs on a computer (I haven't yet seen a computer-based reading program that has qualities that I would say are actually valuable for literacy development beyond simple phonemic awareness and decoding.) To summarize, in my experience, most centers are organized around remedial work that is awfully dull.
The Movie Trolls and Felt Scrapbooks
While I was thinking about the design of this workshop, I was watching the movie Trolls with my kids. In Trolls, the main character, Poppy makes scrapbooks out of felt. "Felt" is actually the material that inspires the aesthetic of the movie and the opening is a stop-motion action sequence. Artist Priscilla Wong (studio pictured below) describes her process using felt in an article on NPR.
Felt characters in Priscilla Wong's studio. See the article here.
I thought back of an experience teaching artist Debbi Arseneaux led in a classroom last year. We were modeling arts and literacy classes in schools. Teachers would give us the text or curriculum they were working on and we'd create a series of classes with their students that demonstrated how the arts could be woven in meaningful ways into the fabric of their classroom. On one visit we were given a story about a boy and his horse from the Wonders textbook. The problem with the story is that it is about four pages long with absolutely no action or conflict. The boy wakes up, takes care of his horse, goes to school, returns home, takes care of his horse, and goes to sleep.
We thought, "What can we do to excite students about this story—what experience can we build around the text". I thought about my daughter and how she likes to take care of her dolls, much like this boy takes care of his horse. I also remembered one of those best-selling toys from 1997, the Tamagotchi—a digital egg on a keychain that the user cares for as it hatches into a pet.
After reading the story, Debbi asked the students if they were to have their very own pet, what kind would they want, "Anything is possible!" The students couldn't stay sitting on the floor as their hands shot into the air and they leapt to their feet. She explained that we would create our pets after lunch and the students couldn't stop talking about their pets through the lunch period.
There is a reason so much of children's literature is based on a child and an animal. Children are taken care of by their parents, and they practice these same behaviors on their own dolls and animals. It is their way of imitating adult behaviors and having a sense of agency and control over their own imaginative worlds.
Traditional and Contemporary Art Making
With the first chapter of Ollie's Odyssey I modeled many multi-sensory reading activities with the teachers (see the full workshop documentation of the workshop here), the part of the workshop I loved the most was the ending. After reading about Billy's friend Ollie, teachers envisioned what their imaginary friend or "favorite toy" might look like. Using the character profile inspired by the 52nd Street Project, teachers created a world around the character and first practiced with a pencil sketch (download the character profile and sketch template here: My Imaginary Friend Template).
The teachers then began to use felt to construct their imaginary friend. A teacher asked me, "Do I need a background?" I left the process very open-ended. I purposely didn't give the teachers a template because I wanted to avoid the Thanksgiving-Hand-Turkey-Syndrome where all the products look exactly the same.
Teachers' Imaginary Friends
These were some of the products the teachers created.
Teachers made their friends using multi-colored felt, Elmer's glue, and scissors—the simplest of supplies. At the end of the day we stood in a circle and introduced our friends to the larger group. We then explored how stop-motion animation apps can be used to bring the characters to life and to build stories around them (Stop Motion Studio App in the itunes store).
Although it was a remarkable morning, I was struck by the comments of two teachers who were leaving the experience. They commented that this is exactly what they want to do in their classroom—yet the state-mandated tests are coming soon. "We aren't allowed to do projects like this. We have to get our students ready for the tests." They then told me they thought it was time to retire from teaching as they walked to their cars with their imaginary friends in hand.