Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Road Salt and Crayon Factories


Today, the kids made hills. They stuffed garbage bags briming with newspaper and stretched out their lovely landscapes...perfectly ready for imaginary settlement and eventual industrialization...

I gave them a list of ingredients--- asking them, what role, or job, each ingredient should represent in our town. The ingredients and responses are below.

Coffee- Starbucks! Landscaping! Farming! (A holler came "do you even know what landscaping is?")
Soap- Houses. Hotels. (They both wash lots of towels!!)
Oil- Oil Refineries!!! (yes, this was yelled--- I must talk about oil a bit much)
Salt- Food for animals in farms... Road Salt!! (I'm so proud of the kid who said road salt, my eyes get a little misty--- in most states people have completely altered stream chemistry with road salt.
Powerade- A crayon factory (I went with it...)

The kids put these ingredients spread out on their landscape... And then it rained... and all of the ingredients merged into one lake in the middle of the mountain range. A few well placed factories were spared... but, most of the kids were living in the runoff of a crayon factory?

We're all in one big lake together. Sometimes the blue gets mixed in with the red... All of us a little bit more colorful for the experience...
(photo: http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/school/html/reviews/crayonf.htm)