New and Old

 Don't you just love when school supplies show up in the stores?  I do. I always thought the first day of school was so exciting (the next most exciting was the last day.)  For us, everything was new - pencils were sharp, crayons were too, pens yet untried, packs of paper, too. Shoes still stiff,  even our underwear was new.  Don't you just love the smell of a box of new crayons? Crack the small seal, open the lid and inhale.  I always hated using the first new crayon because it meant they weren't new anymore but I did appreciate the possibilities in them. 

This morning in the store the center aisle was filled with bright mechanical pencils, packages of yellow no.2 pencils, markers, crayons, unopened bottles of glue and glue sticks, post-it notes, construction paper in packs of a thousand, pencil cases, locker mirrors, technical calculators, I just stood smiling and took it all in, loving it all and remembering the excitement when I had an excuse to buy some of all of it.  

 

I couldn't resist.  I had to buy a pack of new mechanical pencils.  They were so pretty. I use them to draw around applique templates so there's the excuse. 

All this new and sharp and shiny reminded me of yesterday when the museum held a day camp of learners experiencing Native American ways and I helped lead a group of campers in pictographs and feather painting. I explained what pictographs were, how they told a story without words because the Native Americans didn't have an alphabet.  The kids thought of a small story to demonstrate with pictographs and then drew it out.  There were examples of pictographs they could use or they could make up their own.

They were both challenged and excited about making their own thoughts come alive in a picture.  One little guy asked, "how do I draw 'was' ?  I said, "you don't."   One little guy was determined to do a story about Sonic the Hedgehog and I could see right away that no amount of explaining was going to change his mind, so we went with it.  It is his story, after all.

Feather painting was fun, too.  We saw examples, photos of quite intricate portraiture and they got to work.  We used acrylic paints and it was fun!  One little boy started to make a raccoon but it turned into a rabbit and then morphed into a rock.  But he was having fun explaining that to the rest of us. 

And this morning as I was standing in the aisle at the store drooling over all of the implements, colors, technology in front of me I couldn't help but think of yesterday.