CLASSROOM PHOTO OF THE YEAR

Last year I wrote a post I called My Classroom Picture of the Year.  One of the interesting aspects of that post was that it was taken in a different part of the room from the sand and water table area and presented a building project, not sand or water play.  This year, I am also posting a picture of a building project, but for this picture the building takes place next to the sensory table. Again, though, it has little to do with sand or water play.  It is a very simple picture of a child building a modest structure with the loose parts that are provisioned on shelves next to the sand table.  I call it: The Wondrous in the Everyday.

Why is this my classroom picture of the year?  The reason is that this picture represents so many layers of thought and concentration by this child.  He has failed to balance his structure once, but tries a second time to see if it will stand.  The picture captures the moment he cautiously lets go to see if it will stand this second time. You can see his whole body is poised in expectation. He is also gauging the structure's stability moment by moment as he lets go.   The amount of concentration is immediate, fluid and total.

Why did the child take these mundane loose parts---a plastic coffee container, a cardboard tube, a plastic measuring cup---and decide to build a structure?   Whatever the reason, it was quite generative.  Over the course of four weeks this child continued to build using a small variety of loose parts in multiple attempts to build various balanced structures.  Here is a sampling.

Is the structure seen in My Classroom Picture of the Year beautiful?  To be honest, not particularly.  That is not the type of beauty this classroom picture represents.  Rather, it represents a concrete idea that a child has the capacity to continually see possibilities is these most ordinary of materials.  At first it may be serendipity, but can and does become intentional with causation.  That's a different kind of beauty, a beauty that comes from deep inside and is able to be expressed with the found materials on hand in a highly individual way.

Here is the picture of the child showing his reaction to his success after his second attempt at balancing the structure.

This last picture would not be possible with out the first picture, my picture of the year.  That picture is really about how the mundane and ordinary are transformed into magic in a child's hands everyday in the classroom.

Happy New Year and and may you be lucky enough to celebrate the many wonders that happen every day in your classroom.

P.S. If you are interested in more context for this set of pictures, I wrote about this child's original building in a post called Agency.  What you will also find in that post is the mother's perspective and his own reactions to seeing himself build in a couple videos I took of him making his balancing structures.