Several children descended upon my house and yard yesterday for another round of Wednesday afternoon chaos, irrational exuberance, character education, and elementary-school- age cultural exchange. With no particular plan in place for outdoor games, we improvised. I drew a lot of seemingly random lines and circles on the driveway with chalk and got out my box of marbles and other multi-colored glass trinkets. Other children joined in the right-brained approach by writing whatever numbers in the circles that occurred to them: 5, 2, 3, 4, 10, 9. Another child added “Yes|No” to the lines in the midst of the circles. Then we took turns making up rules to our invented game. First rule: everyone put your marble on a line.
I pointed out to everyone that we all put our marbles on the same line. Then I asked everyone to point to their marble. Hey, keeping the rules simple means that we all get a chance to basically follow along. Until someone gets bored. (I can always count on my oldest child to tell me when something is boring. She was happy to oblige in doing that after the next person took his turn making up a rule.) The next rule was for everyone to race their marbles. Unfortunately for some, this meant that several marbles disappeared under my parked minivan. After retrieving the marbles, the next rule was for everyone to stand in a circle and roll their marble toward the center of the driveway. The marbles went willy-nilly and then followed the contours of the driveway to what had been deemed the “losing zone” where we did not want our marbles to drift (according to the rule-maker). After more of this silly aimlessness we decided it was snack time.
After snack we convened indoors for a writing activity. This came from Brilliant Star magazine, aimed at kids 8 to 12 years old. In it was a writing contest: “If the earth could speak, what would she say?” The challenge was to write up to 50 of your own words on this and mail it in to the magazine. Much focus and effort was applied in the execution of this task, especially for the youngest (ages 4 to 6) who are just beginning to learn their alphabet or how to put their own words together on paper. (For example, my five-year-old son sounded out the word “earth” as “rf.” He tends to leave out vowels.)
When I don’t have seven children running around in my back yard (as I do now—every day is an afterschool children’s class around here), I’ll return to post some of the children’s written responses to the contest question. One highlight was that almost every boy wrote something about flowers.