{"id":246,"date":"2008-06-11T22:40:45","date_gmt":"2008-06-12T03:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/2008\/06\/11\/messing-around\/"},"modified":"2008-06-11T22:45:51","modified_gmt":"2008-06-12T03:45:51","slug":"messing-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/2008\/06\/11\/messing-around\/","title":{"rendered":"Messing Around"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I took the kids out on the concrete area outside our school&#8217;s side door. It&#8217;s kind of nice because it is shaded and relatively clean for a concrete slab. And the weather was too beautiful to be inside. I gave them each a huge 36&#8243; X 24&#8243; sheet of newsprint, a big paint brush, a jar of water, some crayons, oils pastels, colored pencils, and water soluble markers. Then I made them all come sit with me next to my paper, and I proceeded to mess around with color, putting one thing on top of or next to another, wondering out loud about my &#8220;experiment,&#8221; painting over top of things with clear water to see what would blend and what would bleed. They started directing me. . .&#8221;try this&#8221;. . .&#8221;put some this over it&#8221;. . . &#8220;why don&#8217;t you. . .&#8221;  I said, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t you do it?&#8221;  And they did&#8211;for nearly an hour. In the afternoon we came back with little paper plate palettes with small blobs of yellow, blue, and red watercolor and clean water. I returned to my paper, messed with the colors, and then did a watercolor wash over some of the crayon. &#8220;Hmmm.&#8221;  &#8220;Can we &#8216;speriment now?&#8221;<a href='http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/artkids.jpg' title='artkids.jpg'><img src='http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/artkids.jpg' alt='artkids.jpg' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Kids don&#8217;t get to mess around with stuff. Our deck at Two Trees was an art studio, a science laboratory, a playhouse, office, and yes, a dog pen. Doing experiments was a way of life. Messing around with art, music, science, writing, building, nature&#8212;how else do we get scientists, artists, musicians, writers, inventors, vets? Kids need dirty up to their elbows nitty gritty under the fingernails no directions experiences. We all do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I took the kids out on the concrete area outside our school&#8217;s side door. It&#8217;s kind of nice because it is shaded and relatively clean for a concrete slab. And the weather was too beautiful to be inside. I gave them each a huge 36&#8243; X 24&#8243; sheet of newsprint, a big paint brush, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22,34,77],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/mom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}