My ocean smells like fresh beans and gold fish
Guiding Ideas
The oceans between our land. How will we get there? Repeated patterns on Earth. Where will our land go? What grows on our land? A collection of love letters in the form of a book to the land.
For today’s lab the idea was to invite Arielle. You may not know this, but Arielle is not the biggest fan of messy. For this reason at the staff meeting Arielle was presented with a pile of cold, damp, indigo pulp under which was an invitation which read:
“The witch, the professor, the curator, and the gardener cordially invite
Mi Casita’s messy-averse Bruja-in-training, Arielle to get messy at LAB”
Ingredients for today’s lab
Indigo pulp and new land masses. sprouts, cards envelopes, and many many books about the planet, people, patterns, oceans, and animals.
What just happened?
We sat around the ocean canvas we painted the first day of this project and imagined how the ocean around our land might feel, look, smell, and taste. Livneh’s ocean is “pink and warm with delinfines y tiburones. A Red ocean.”, while Sunny’s is a “pink ocean, blue ocean, purple ocean with sharks and whales.” Luca’s has dolphins, “My ocean moves in a submarine.” Niko, “If you jump into mine, mine will wiggle.” Rey, “Mine is red and goes like this BOOM! PEW!! My ocean is rainbow.” Eva took the opporunity that in real life sometime we can actually see rainbows in our oceans, but this is because sometimes BIG ships spill oil which can look like rainbows, but this is not nice for the fish who live in those spills. Niko then added,” Hmmm it could be oil, it looks pretty but it’s not the good kind of rainbow. Mine changes color. Mine is really really cold- Near the ice. (BRRRRR).” Livneh then added, “My ocean smells like fresh beans and gold fish.” Oliver, “My ocean smells like dried bones and rainbows.” Levi, “ My ocean is a little ocean at my grandma’s house with a deck. It’s blue at Poppop’s (I think that’s what he said” and the big ocean is broken.” Zoya’s ocean sounds like chooooo chooo she explains while moving her body rhythmically, “Those are the waves- my ocean smells like ducks and salty.”
Together we again sang with Isabel. “This land is your land”. Wendy explained why this song is important because sometimes grownups forget that this land is your land AND this land is my land, and this land is for sharing. You know how hard it can be to share and sometimes grownups are not so good at sharing either. You are our teachers and can really help teach the grown ups. These are the lyrics for now. More to come as we land on new lands. Watch the video below to see a snipet of the process.
Estas tu tierra, estas mi tierra
De California hasta Nueva York (Nueva YOL!!)
De las montañas hasta el mar.
Esta tierra es para mi y para ti. Para todos!
While at one table Wendy invited amigues to try spicy sprouts (radish sprouts) and not spicy sprouts (bulgar sprouts), amigues dictated love letters to their land.
“Arielle, can you use your long nails to press on my land". An extended time to really explore how our hands feel with pulp and what happens when we smooth it, poke it, build it up, and break it down. The end result looked something like the polar ice caps…perhaps that is where they will end up.
The Post-LAB-que-pasó for grown ups:
After lab each week we meet to talk about what happened, what was said, what seeds were sown and what seeds didn’t quite stick. One of the concepts that really moved during this week’s discussion was the idea of boredom. You are invited to think about this as well, both in your time with your kids, in our time in the classroom and even in your own person and adult time:
Boredom is an invitation to see where there’s resonance
and to look for a new angle.