Fun with Students: Preschool to College

Friday (Day 5) we got to help the BEE Montessori Preschool children paint t-shirts. They came out six at a time, and watching their curiosity as to what was going on turn to an intense concentration on the task at hand was very heart warming. Several children tried to put their smocks on like jackets, with the open part in the front. And while it was nice to know they knew how to put on a jacket, we had put them through a confusing experience of wearing a smock so they wouldn’t get paint on their clothes. One little boy I helped chose the monkey stamp, and his precision in choosing colors, making sure the paint didn’t drip off of the brush, the way he’d pause after every stroke to look at his work, and his determination to paint every corner of the stamp made him seem like quite the little artist. The children’s attentiveness as I carried their stamp over to the blank white t-shirts made me smile; as I crouched down to push the stamp on the fabric, they’d copy me, wanting to watch my every move as I finalized their creation on a t-shirt they’d get to keep.

After lunch, our group of five got to play a type of African drum, which had goatskin stretched over either end of a metal barrel. Our friend Eddie taught us a fun rhythm, and I finally got to get my hands on a drum again since I graduated high school.