These are a Few of Our Dangerous Things



Once again, I am inspired by Teacher Tom, who has been blogging about the book 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) by Gever Tulley and Julie Spiegler.  Well, natch, I had to order it, and bring it to summer school.  But before we began working through Thing 1 and Thing 2 out of Tulley's book, Leila invented #51, and was quickly joined by many of her friends on this dangerous feat...

After playground, we went in for a brief circle, where I had already enlisted Aidan and Martin to demonstrate planned Dangerous Thing #1, Kiss Hello Like the French.  They just couldn't wait to demonstrate.  I only wish I'd had a camera that worked. :-(  Bev Bos says to forget the camera because it doesn't capture the lump in your throat, and truer words have never been spoken on a morning like this one.  This is the closest I could come to capturing the action with my phone as Mali greeted Nelle after her late arrival.  "Bonjour."  "Bonjour"  Cheek kiss.  Cheek kiss.  Precious.

Tulley doesn't offer these activities without a lot of reasoning behind the dangers and why you should take the risk.  What's so dangerous about Kissing Hello Like the French?  Well, possibly you could get cooties (What are cooties?, I was asked) or you might get embarrassed.  Everyone tried but one, and I hear on good authority his parents have to pull the kisses out of him so I'm calling it a success.  Why should you try this?  According to Tulley, learning a new kind of greeting develops a greater appreciation of the subtle aspects of other cultures and a deeper understanding of our own sense of personal space and sources of embarrassment.  I hope your children came home and pushed your envelopes.

Later in the morning, we tried our second dangerous thing--Putting Strange Stuff in the Microwave.  We gathered round and if I cautioned them once, I cautioned them a thousand times never to attempt cooking ANYTHING in the microwave without a parent's permission.  But with my permission today, we cooked a CD for 3 seconds (fireworks!) and a marshmallow for 10 seconds (goo!) and a bar of Dove soap for a minute.

Perhaps the third dangerous thing we did is that EVERYONE insisted on sticking their fingers in the gooey marshmallow and left with the sticky substance on our fingers we had no choice but to lick...Tulley claims we take kitchen appliances for granted and that the microwave is as powerful a tool for scientific inquiry as a microscope!

Elsewhere in the classroom during the morning, we all had fun discovering a new purchase, Froebel's Gifts.  The adults all asked, "What do you do with them?"  The children just sat down and did.

Got a migraine?  We performed acupuncture (or at least our version of it) on these styrofoam heads.  Another shout out to Teacher Tom!  Aidan wanted to know if he could bring his home! They were given names!

I put out a door mirror and turned my back and it had been filled with magnatiles!  Liam and Jacob puzzled them in perfectly and then began a second layer...

Water time!  Sometimes pictures really do speak louder than words...

I remembered a piece of plastic gutter I had purchased long ago and set it in the water table...ever curious, this kept Jacob occupied the entire time...

Meanwhile, Liam practices his signature in water spray...

And our awesome water wall gets a workout...

Tomorrow...bombs in a bag...mastering the perfect somersault...or driving nails!  What will it be, what WILL it be?