"Sticking My Neck Out........."

Ever since the new teacher assumed the helm in our unit for the rest of this year, two or three times a day we find ourselves involved in some sort of craft, creating flowers, animals, whatever might just be appropriate for the theme at hand, material merely a matter of using one’s imagination. Glue is a necessity most of the time in one form or another. Construction paper, crayons, paint, bingo daubers, and markers are standards. From there, however, it all depends on how deeply into fantasy your brain is still willing to go. For some of us, childhood and Never-Never Land is yet not all that far to reach. In fact, I’ve found it a nice place to visit on a regular basis as long as you don’t decide to stay there any longer than the job requires. It’s fun to create caterpillars out of egg cartons and frogs from picnic plates. It’s amazing what the mind can see if it looks beyond the normal use of any number of things: the inner cardboard cylinder of a roll of toilet paper, for example; a bag of miniature marshmallows; or even an ordinary drinking straw. Knowing she would not be with us yesterday, our leader handed me a large container of the latter before she left school Friday and told me to do whatever came to me in so far as to positioning them above some shredded green “grass” she had already attached to the bottom of a few purple sheets. Searching on the internet over the weekend provided me with nothing in the way of inspiration. Sunday evening, just before drifting into dreamland, it hit me. Why not cut the tube right down the middle, measure off proper lengths for each physical position, and, with a bit of yellow circles, make our current animal of observation: the giraffe! It’s certainly no Picasso nor Van Gogh, but it came together pretty well, I think. Tomorrow maybe we’ll try a rhinoceros shaped out of dried mushrooms and rubberbands……