...to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words." ---Goethe.
William Samuel Parrott, Mount Hood, 1875/1895.If no reasonable words passed my lips ("Talmage! Leave Sydney alone!!!"), today, at least, I made sure we saw some fine art. Jo and I took the kids to the Portland Art Museum for a kid-style tour.
Jolynn, you may or may not know, used to teach at a ritzy pre-school in New York. So ritzy they were not pipe cleaners, they were chenille stems. Jolynn is great to go to museums with because she knows all the tricks from her pre-school days. She brought a bag with objects in it that she pulled out one at a time. T and J were supposed to find the object represented in any of the works of art. For example, when she pulled out the small dog, they found a dog in the room. This took a small degree of hinting ("do you see any dogs [pointing to display case housing said dog] here?") and/or modeling ("oh, look! I see a rectangle right here.").
While Talmage and Joseph were receiving their advanced art lessons, the little kids gazed at the spotlights, high in the ceiling; Isaac flashed his wide grin and Sydney ooh'd really, really LOUDLY at the Native American baskets.
The above pic is kiefed from the PAM website and I hope I don't get in trouble for posting it here. It was one of my favorites.
(If you'd like the unedited version of what it's like to take a 2 and 3 year-old to the art museum, contact me).
1 comment:
I'm chortling to myself about chenille stems and imagining your unedited version. I don't think I've tried an art museum with the boys yet. Science museum, check. Air and space museum, check. Oh WAIT! I just remembered that when Ethan was little, we attended a local art museum on a free Friday evening. Ethan was at the stage where he loved to remove his clothes, and we had spent some time discussing the importance of being modest, keeping clothes on, etc. At this particular museum, there was an abundance of nude statues and Ethan kept asking, loudly, "Why does THAT statue not have any clothes on?"
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