Looking forward to midsummer celebrations

 Midsummer will be celebrated all over Sweden this coming Friday (the Friday closest to the summer solstice) - here is a picture story of how my family celebrates - taken last summer... We are lucky as this happens in a small community where we have our forest house on the same land where my husband's parents live - there are meadows, there is the forest, there is the lake and there are enough people (when guests are invited) to make a great celebration... it really reminds me of something from Astrid Lindgren's Bullerby (Noisy Village)

the day starts with picking flowers to decorate the midsummer pole - but of course that is not the only thing that is picked

finding wild strawberries takes priority!

we make crowns of flowers - using both wild flowers and bought flowers

there is dancing around the midsummer pole - many different songs

and a lot of laughter

a detail of the midsummer pole - it is a pole with a bar across with two circles hanging from either side of the bar.

lots of opportunities to find insects and frogs and toads - and to show off finds (although not mixing frogs and insects...)

after the singing and cake eating it is time to play games - a series of challenges - this one for example - how many strikes to get the nail all the way in...?

can you stack the rocks to the specified height - one for children and one for adults - there was a piece os wood to help measure...

always fun when you totally challenge how high you can go and it eventually falls down...

counting how many blocks are inside the box

And of course there is midsummer food - sill (pickled herring and other flavoured herring and a whole variety of them, new potatoes, prawn mix and salmon mix... but salmon usually features somewhere...

playing in the water as the evening comes

taking it easy in the dipping sun with some food grilled at the water's edge

watching the sun dip, but not go down... it never gets truly dark - for 24 hour daylight you have to go further north than Stockholm

Ice-cream dough - Eczema friendly GOO sensory play!

so here we are with newly mixed coconut body lotion and cornflour - I put extra cornflour  out so that the children could feel it in its dry state and mix it into their dough/goo as they pleased. We did it directly on the table (which went faster to clean than I had expected) and it smelled absolutely wonderful.
The reason for the lotion is because it will be kinder to the children with dry skin/eczema - I am thinking along the lines of using coconut oil next time - I am curious to see how the dough would behave coming from the fridge and changing consistency as it warms up in hands... it would also be very kind to skin and totally natural.

In the afternoon we got out the "ice-cream dough" again, but used trays this time as our work surface, it did make clean up faster... As you can see the dough snaps cleanly as you would expect cornflour to behave

the lotion bottle with pump function was available to the children - they liked to spread it out on top of the dough with the ice-cream spoons

Adding more and more lotion was great fun - watching the slippery lotion pump out and then mixing it in ... of course the bottle got quite slippery and the challenge to pump out the lotion became harder and harder, but this did not deter the children...

of the four children playing in the afternoon - two of them kept their dough quite firm, one kept their hands mess free, and three had VERY messy hands. The children had no problem washing their hands themselves - I did help though scrape of some of the goo beforehand - which became the "thing" to do - as the third child made her hands messy just so that I could do that with her - valuable one on one time!

Play-dough ice-cream creativity

playdough, ice-cream spoons, bowls and cups of coloured rice - ice-cream role-play creative session

it started off as ice-cream with sprinkles and then turned into a birthday cake with candles

putting sprinkles (coloured rice) onto the dough was MUCH easier than trying to get the rice OFF the dough. Rice left in the dough added to the sensory experience

spider

hedgehog

or maybe they were legs and not spikes?

lots of testing and inspiring

one year old loading the dough with as many spoons as the dough could hold - and then returning the spoons back to the box...

My film-making children - totally adult free!

My children have been busy making films - and as they make a film they see how to further improve it - like realising holding the i-pad is not creating the steady base for film making - so right now they are starting a new film in a new location so that they do not need to hold the i-pad...

This film is called "oops"

By Michael and Isabelle Axelsson

(oh and now Sophia is in on the action....)

How the garden grows

One of the best parts of returning regularly to the same place is to see how it changes over time... the garden close to the preschool (named "The Snail Park" by the children and us as we have found so many snails there) has turned into a jungle - everything seems to be suddenly taller than the children - and now there is also a HUGE ocean of Iris attracting bees and other flying insects to marvel at.

The beauty with different kinds of weather is that there is always something to discover - on wet and damp days there are plenty of snails, on dry days there are seeding dandelion heads to blow and beetles to look for. Finding things is such a great way to share experiences - to learn about social interactions

here you can see just how tall everything has grown... the children felt very adventurous making their way through the greenery ...

and nature is always so amazing to look at, to find new details each time you are there - like how plants will wind their way up stalks of other plants to reach the sunlight... the whole idea of #lookclosely - the need to slow down... and by visiting the same place we give children, and ourselves the opportunity/possibility to slow down and see things up close...

I think it is an important aspect of learning to return to the same place and to allow children to discover the changes - and as this post shows, you do not have to have a forest school to do this... this little patch of green was a small public space between the shops and the underground station... and yet it provided countless natural experiences for the children. They learned about weather, the seasons, about the natural cycles of plants... shoots, leaves, flowers, seeds and repeat... they learned about the animals that came to this area - the snails, the birds and sometimes squirrels... going to larger natural areas gave us more natural diversity...

The returning to the same space also meant that the children became comfortable with the space... they felt safe there, so energy was spent on play, learning and exploring rather than getting to know the space. New locations are fun, but returning to the same space offers another type of learning.

here are some more photos of the same space...

space for fairy exploration and imagination

a space for social interaction - making up new games together

a space for art... for discovering science and the self

snails... featured big... and gave us the opportunity to explore friendship, expectation, empathy, dealing with fears, learning about nature etc etc etc

space to think outside the box... to challenge the body... risky play

and to find more things to challenge

to doscover that surfaces change with the weather... from dry, to wet to frozen and slippery

the steps down to the garden offered many different opportunities for play, and rest and chatting with friends

loose parts could always be found

colour exploration over the seasons

visiting the same space allowed the children to play with scary ideas...

texture, sensory exploration

taking art out, and exploring the space in a new way... sometimes dress up clothes, or chalk or....

different seasons... and also the chance to be a part of the world... to meet others...

This post was updated and posted again on June 13th 2018.

Recycling art

In 2008 I worked with a group of 5-6 year olds where we started on a piece of HUGE artwork of the sea based on the children's interest (no doubt influenced by their summer holidays)

The background was created by using a white glue wash with different shades of ripped blue, green and white tissue paper overlapping each other. Then the children painted waves across this and splashed on bubbles and then finished off with glitter.

Over the weeks the children filled the sea with images of fish that they created themselves and stuck on. The artwork filled an entire wall.

a sea filled with fish and sea weed

The next project was France, as we had a child that moved from there and we were all curious to learn more... as part of that project we decided to take down our sea and replace it with a Monet inspired artwork. It just felt a shame to take it all down... so we looked at Monet's artwork and we decided together that we could keep up the background and that it would be the water part of our Monet inspired painting...

The children worked out how to make a bridge for the painting (with lots of dots on it as Monet's style seemed to be full of dots and splodges). We also made waterlilies and Irises to complete our Monet inspired creation. I mixed flour and art medium into the paint to make it very thick and structured an we studied how the flowers only looked like flowers from a distance and not close up. It was wonderful watching the children move back and forth across the room to be able to see their flower "grow" from a distance. I noticed that painting flowers this way was easier for the boys than the girls ( I brought in real Iris for them to paint) and I wondered if this was because it was seldom they drew or painted flowers while the girls did it often, you know the kind with a circle in the middle and five round petals going round it...

The children got the taste for exploring new countries so we moved on to a variety of countries each with a connection to the children in the group in one way or another... when we "travelled" to Africa we decided to once again re-use the blue background

This time it was animals that really caught their imagination (this is a close up) we created a baobab tree, with a leopard and parrots in it and a life size 3D giraffe baby using old scraps of paper glued onto the giraffe form and then we glued tissue paper over it to create the 3D effect... the children then painted the giraffe patterns - if I remember correctly there started off with 4 children and ended up with 12 working on the giraffe... and just like the sea artwork the children could add to this African animal scene as they pleased

Sorry the photo quality is not the same as usual - but they are photos of photos...

The Love Tree revisited

In January February the children and I embarked on a art-philosophy or a philosophical artwork together where we discussed what LOVE was and how we could transform these ideas of love into art... our LOVE TREE came into being...

you can read about it


Unfortunately there have been a few weeks of troubles in Stockholm (you might have read about it or seen it on the news) and our preschool had the misfortune of being a part of that - luckily it was just one window that was smashed (and fortunately just the outer glazing) - but not so luckily it was the window where our Love Tree was...

Last week the window was replaced and we had to take down all the parts of the love tree... I put them to the side and today I presented them to the children with the task of creating something new with them...

here is the original Love Tree - with snow in the background (so glad THAT is gone and the green has returned)

I placed the parts onto the table with a long piece of paper... the children started by sorting all the parts - hands, hearts, butterflies, footprints etc - I had also "thrown in" some grass or long green strands. Once we had sorted everything we moved the project onto the floor where it was easier for everyone to work together. I asked if they had a plan... how were we going to position everything... yes I have a plan, I have a plan, and I have a plan... but not one plan could be verbalised or shown - so it was decided that we start with the  footprints and work out a way from there...

It was an intense session there was a lot of "me, me , me" and not very much "we" so there are not many photographs... as all my energy was needed with the children to listen, to support, to remind that we are working together and that we are sharing and that is part of LOVE... but I guess they were just not feeling the LOVE today. So this got me thinking - could this be partly due to the fact we have just had a long weekend (most children have had 4 days off in connection with Sweden's National Day) would it have been better to have had this session on another day where there was more we and not quite so much me?
Anyway - they enjoyed learning a new technique - of making "bridges" with the green grass/strips (they had been pre-painted with green, blue and yellow for a more textured look).

The children then glued on the oranges, butterflies, hands, hearts and stars - again no time for photographs as most of the discussions were about "mine" "no the preschools" "Now I can't reach the glue" - so it was necessary for me to be present and not behind the camera - to act as mediator, to support them in their thinking processes, to encourage them to pause and reflect on what they were saying... to even reflect on what they were doing for they started getting so involved in their words they stopped looking at what they were doing and started putting glue on the "wrong" side of their hearts or on the floor instead of the paper...
We finished off with a drizzle of white glue so they could shake some glitter all over it... as they all LOVE glitter.

Part of me wanted to give up on the artwork - but I also knew that no matter where we were these children NEEDED to have this discussion - they needed to talk about what's mine, who am I, my rights, collaboration and sharing... it was going to happen... it might as well be during this artwork where I was better able to support them, to hear them and to mediate when necessary - and being part of the process means I know when I can let them steer the conversation, even though at times heated, and when to help keep things cool enough to be productive.

There is a LOT of emotion in this art work.

It will be interesting to see how they reflect on it... what will THEY remember of the process...?