“You can use this color.” She handed me the black crayon, and I proceeded to color the zebra.
I was about halfway through a cool volunteer experience with Generation United at a nearby learning center for kids under six. I had already spent some time chatting with two boys on the swings, singing the alphabet (with sign language), counting, and reading a rhyming story to the preschool class. The teachers laid out some activity stations and asked if I would just work alongside the students.
If you’ve ever seen me speak, you know I’m a big fan of being 5 years old. There’s a cool innocence and excitement about the world at that age. Within moments of stepping onto the playground I made new “friends.” Throughout recess, they asked me to watch them run, go down the slide, or swing higher. I enjoyed lining up with them to go back in class, standing super quiet to please the teacher. I loved the enthusiasm towards the songs we sung, students often looking back to make sure I was also singing along. This classroom full of students doing many tasks that far surpassed what I could do at five simply amazed me.
So the chance to sit with them and just play along was incredibly awesome. I began at the rubberband station, watching students make interesting designs with their gridded board. At first it was just a series of geometric shapes, but then it became story based designs, “Patrick, do you see my alien?”
“Is it in a cage?”
“Yep, it’s trapped, so we’re safe.”
Next, I headed over to the coloring station. There, one of the preschoolers informed me that we would be coloring a zebra picture together. I’m not one to argue too much, but when my first attempt with the crayon caused me to go outside the lines, I asked for her advice. With a newly minted crayon, I was able to complete the coloring. The dinosaur station was still pretty packed as was the special paper craft table. I ended up spending my last chunk of time at the playdoh station.
Three students sat at the table with me. One girl had made her own little circus parade using the cookie cutters available to the students. A boy on my right went back and forth of quickly making an animal with the mold and then quickly smashing it, making “monster” sounds as he did so. As I sat down, so did the girl on my left.
It was a pretty elaborate table. In addition to cookie cutters, there were pizza cutters, rolling pins, and a huge mound of playdoh. An idea popped in my head, and I started to make a sun, eventually adding several rays, a pair of sunglasses, and a smile. As soon as I attached three of the rays, the boy and girl on either side of me both exclaimed, “you’re making a sun!”
“How do you do it?” the girl asked.
I showed her my basic first few steps and then watched as she struggled to replicate. It took her a few more attempts, but she soon started to make her own unique sun—her rays jotting straight out, versus the triangle design of my sun. When she finally added her styled sunglasses and huge smile to the sun, she called over one of her preschool teachers and said, “Teacher! Teacher! Look what I made!”
The boy sitting next to me now wanted his own sun. “Can you make it for me?”
“Why don’t you try on your own and I can give you some tips?”
“No, just make it for me.” He hardly rolled out his playdoh. Instead every few seconds he’d turn to me and say “do it for me.”
I don’t want to knock abilities. We all do develop at different points. I do believe that there are certain points in a child’s life where you should tie his shoes for him and other times when you should encourage him to tie them on his own. But with this boy, I knew he could at least try, and he wasn’t going to. He wanted someone else to do it for him.
I guess what jumped out about this for me was when you took away some of that cookie cutter playdoh design, he didn’t feel like he could create on his own. He was slightly afraid of taking that risk. Sure, it’s just playdoh, but I’ve seen this same idea appear in our daily lives down the road.
In my own life, I know I struggle sometimes to create—to do something that is outside of the mold. I’m afraid to step outside of the lines at times. I might see the same grid that the students saw on the rubberband table and only think I can make triangles and squares—not aliens trapped behind bars.
But there is a problem when we don’t take that creative initiative. What we need right now are people who aren’t just going to stop using the molds or to replicate suns, but rather we need people like the little girl who ultimately designed her own. We need people to utilize the existing mediums and taking them to new places.
Yes, our organizations can continue to replicate the same things we’ve done year after year. No harm will come from that. But what if we go beyond what we’ve done before, put our own unique spin on it, and have a moment where we can go “Teacher! Teacher! Look what I made!”