a ladder to magical powers

In yesterday's philosophy session we talked about where do magic powers come from... there were several ideas being put forward... the fairy queen hands them out, you catch fairies and take the power from them, you mix various things together (they were quite specific what you had to mix... water leaves a strand of hair...then a dash of ice of you wanted ice-power, or some fire if you wanted fire power), from the heart, from the sun... you needed a ladder to get to the sun to shake some powers out of it... you can buy them... etc

Today while they ate morning snack I re-read their thoughts to them so that they could get thinking about how we couldplay with some of these ideas...

The Fairy Group wanted to make a power machine... we looked for boxes and other things that would work, but there were so many ideas and suggestions pouring out of their heads that we decided it would be better to catch some of them on paper first... so the children drew designs... for two of the children most of this time went on how to draw a square... moments of frustration as the pencil kept revealing a circle on their paper... it took patience and for one of the children lots of scaffolding when it became obvious that there had been enough frustration for today... "draw a line.. lift up your pencil... draw a line... lift up your pencil" - the lifting up of the pencil was the deciding factor... something that had not occurred to the child. The other child worked out how to do the square on their own and suddenly the air was filled with the joyous sound of "I did it... I made a square" a voice filled with equal amounts of surprise and pride... those moments are fuel to a preschooler teacher's soul. Interestingly one of the circles in the attempts to make a square (the square idea came from the fact the children wanted to use a certain box) was explained as sun power... so very much in tune with our philosophical dialogue yesterday. The designs are now made... next week we start construction...

The Butterfly Group (the children have chosen the group names) wanted to make a ladder to be able to get to the sun and shake out some powers. They soon discovered that finding a ladder long enough was going to be tricky... so they started designs on a space rocket...

The ladders though have stayed with us...

After afternoon snack I showed the children the Disney/Pixar short film "la Luna" where there is a magic ladder that goes up to the moon...

you can watch the film here... it is LOVELY

This inspired the children... they wanted to fly like the child did... as they saw that he flew in the shower of stars...

So I got out the stepladder, we piled mattresses and cushions around it and the children took it in turns to climb to the top (its not the biggest of stepladders) and the children "flew" with enormous joy.
I put the overhead on to create a more magical feel as they were jumping...

As we tidied up to get ready to go outside there were plans amongst the children to fly again tomorrow...