RECIPROCITY AND SURPRISE

Guiding ideas:
Reciprocity, generosity, surprises, the joy of receiving and the joy of giving.

Ingredients for today’s Lab:
Thousands of odds and ends collected from teachers and families, hundreds of boxes, mountains of wrapping paper, yards and yards of ribbons, endless tape, and scissors for all. ✂️

What just happened?!:
Building on last week’s exploration of love and giving, this Lab became a joyful storm of wrapping, unwrapping, and reimagining. Everywhere you looked there were boxes, big, small, glittering, and strange. The air was full of sound: rip, crinkle, snip, tape!

While some children carefully selected each item for their box, considering who they were giving the gift to, others aimed to fill their box to the brim. Some were more excited by the boxes and others by the tape. One child wrapped their box before taping each of their items to the outside.

From this collective chaos emerged a poem, written with the children’s voices, part gift, part memory, part magic:

A Collective Poem — “The Story of My Box”
I chose the glitter because everyone loves glitter.
Kitties, dogs, and cakes are in my box.
Do you remember Sleeping Beauty? — that’s a movie.
I don’t see any numbers here. I want numbers.
Do you have more numbers?
I want to tell you the story of my box.
A key. It was shiny with sticky things.
I put tape on it and I will bring it home.
I put numbers in it.
I am making a present for my birthday.
I want a rock and a heart for my mommy and dad.
It smells like a lollipop, legos, a circle, a tyrannosaurus rex,
a tortilla, and cinnamon.

As we read our poem together, we realized each box carried a little story of love and imagination—a way of giving back to the world. In wrapping, we were also connecting: to each other, to the materials, and to the surprises that live inside every act of creation.