Holli gives me a quick briefing before the first graders arrive. 35 years of teaching, The Orchard School, project based learning, taught all grades, a ton of experience. Today the kids are going to be making whatever they’d like to make. 

She let’s them in.

“Can we use these?” “The scales? Yes.” “Can we use the dinos?” “Sure, put the box here.” “This this this?” “Yes.” “And I’ll open up a sticker store. Are you all ready? Free build!”

Four tables are strewn with all sorts of things to be creative. Kids are everywhere, looking for the materials they want to use. Within minutes a girl is cutting a piece of orange paper, another is putting together a cash register. A boy shows me some tubes that have lights inside. He selects some sheets of cardboard and goes to find a workspace at a table. A boy walks past me saying “I’m going to make a …” I don’t catch what it was. No matter, it’s his project and he knows what he is doing. “Can I have some paper?” “All of that,” Holli answers, pointing to a rack with ten different colors, ready to be turned into whatever can be imagined.

After some quick organization, the sticker store is open. “Hi, welcome to my sticker store,” Holli says,” as some of the children line up for stickers. “What can I do for you today?” She accepts payment in the words “Please” and “Thank you.” That’s my kind of store!

I can’t just sit on the sidelines here, I’ve got to get closer to see everything that is going on. 

A boy constructs a train out of Duplo, the Legos made for younger kids. I think of Sheldon from the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory. Sheldon loved trains. He was a scientist who eventually wins a Nobel Prize in the last season of the show. Might this boy will become a scientist one day? 

The boy who asked if he could use the scales is working together with a friend. They load wooden squares, painted in bright colors, into the dishes on both sides of the scale. This is the classic sort of scale that balances in the middle. They max out the capacity of the dishes and get distracted, opting to play with the lighted tubes at a different table. I’m not alone for long, though. Another boy comes along and starts loading up a second scale. He leaves me when the sticker store reopens. Stickers seem to be a hit.

As a small child I spent the afternoons one week in a pre-K summer camp, in a church basement in the neighborhood. I can picture sitting at tables, doing art, and cutting through a piece of wood one day. I sawed and sawed, then turned the wood over and sawed and sawed from the other side. I finally made it through. I don’t remember what I thought I was making. Two pieces instead of one might have been the entire goal. And some sawdust. But when mom came to pick me up, the teacher brought her over to the table to show her those two pieces. “Paul cut these today.” I stood there, all 40” of me, feeling six feet tall. It was an accomplishment fitting my age, I guess. Some of these kids will feel that way today, taller than the sum of the inches they are. 

“Science is so weird.” That’s a pretty good opening line from the boy who has come back to the table to work with a scale. I ask him what he means and he doesn’t answer, but asks me instead, “How do they even do all this stuff?” This is promising – just how the teacher would like him to be thinking, I’m sure. Just how do those scientists do all that sciencing? Now really!?

I move to a table surrounded by seven kids, boys and girls. They are cutting cardboard, glueing, using markers to decorate. A girl asks the boy next to me to help her cut out a cardboard square. He puts down his pterodactyl sticker to help her. Another girl asks if anyone wants to play with the doll house. No takers, these kids are already engaged. The cardboard cutting gets bogged down – it is quite thick – and seeing that my encouragement didn’t make it any thinner, I make the final cut for them. 

“Everyone, remember, the markers are new. Put the caps back on them!” Of course Holli says this, it sort of belongs to a classroom of first graders and a plastic box of markers, doesn’t it? And then a small voice from the other end of the table, a girl who wants to borrow a pair of scissors, announces, “Sharing is caring!”

I move again. A boy tells me he is making a “habitat for animals.” His words, not mine. He shows me the lake he has colored on the side of the cardboard, so the animals have water to drink. Next to him, the girl who started cutting paper right from the start of class is on her sixth piece. She folds each sheet first, then makes cuts like how we used to make snowflakes. Every piece of paper is a different color. What is it?, I ask. “Well, I’m making a stained glass window, you see.” Of course! It’s beautiful. A boy at the table is making a praying mantis. He demonstrates with his arms and hands how the praying mantis snatches little bugs and brings them back to his mouth to eat. I tell him he is a very convincing praying mantis.

I wander around to catch some more projects. A two-story house. A floor out of magnetic Minecraft blocks. A heart that says ““I love you, mom.” A computer keyboard. A cell phone out of paper. Artwork made out of stickers and masking tape on a piece of cardboard. 

There’s a buzz in the room, I haven’t really noticed it until I sit down, a bit away from the tables now. I try to take it all in. Knots of kids, some movement between tables to find some more resources or to look at someone else’s work. The stain glass art-out-of-paper girl comes to show me her latest piece. She smiles, she’s happy, she goes back to her table to collect all of the parts. She sorts them out on the floor, wondering, I’m sure, how to assemble them into a whole. 

In the middle of all of this creativity, Holli sits at her sticker store. She makes me think of children’s stories I loved as a kid. As an adult I actually read from the opening page of one story to the staff members in the summer school programs I ran. I’m going to remember the name of the stories, I just can’t at the moment. Holli, at any rate, reminds me of the protagonist. The woman in the stories, like Holli, knows exactly what to say to children. She knows exactly what children need. She knows how to solve problems that children have. Nothing is so terribly complicated, just use common sense and kindness and find a solution. And have lots of patience. Let the children play, be there to appreciate what they do when they tell you about it, and love both them and yourself in the process.

What were those stories called … 

… well, it took me some searching and wracking my memory. The stories were about Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Mrs. Piggle Wiggle understood kids. So does Holli. That’s what 35 years of teaching can do for you, if you keep your eyes and ears open. 

Here’s the opening of the first Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle book:

Of course the reason that all the children in our town like Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is because Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle likes them. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle likes children. She likes talking to them and best of all, they do not irritate her …