Sculptor

Luke's daycare rocks. This week the kids made sculptures. Not just watercolor paints and crayon drawings, but 3D sculptures.

Apparently they had been playing with blocks a lot, and one of the teachers thought: "Hey, why not have them make real sculptures? Why not let them glue stuff together rather than just stacking it up and knocking it down?" So they pulled together a bunch of leftover craft stuff -- yarn balls, foam pieces, cardboard tubes, animal cutouts, etc. -- and let the kids glue together whatever they wanted.

Here is Lucas's masterwork:
As you can see in the photo, they asked each kid to name her sculpture. Ali named hers "Baby", Lincoln's was "Baa Baa", and Jack's was "Pom Pom". Why did Lucas name his sculpture "Zookeeper?" Further background about the sculpture project may help resolve this mystery.

Before the kids went to work with their materials, the teachers showed them photos of sculptures around town. Tiffany (Luke's teacher) was able to find a bunch of photos of local sculptures on the internet, and she pasted four of them on the play structure in the big room so the kids could learn about sculptures by looking at them. When I picked Luke up yesterday, we sat down next to the photos and talked about each one. Lucas insisted that one of them was at the zoo. I don't remember it myself, but maybe he saw some sculptures at the Detroit zoo when we were there a couple of weeks ago. For whatever reason, he had zoos on the brain when he made his sculpture, which probably explains the name "Zookeeper" (a word he learned from Good Night Gorilla).

One of the other local sculpture photos was a photo of "The Cube", technically Endover, a giant black steel cube near the main administration building on campus. When you push The Cube, it spins. (The hyperlink earlier in this paragraph actually sends you to The Cube's identical twin, Alamo, at Astor Place in Manhattan; the Wikipedia article gives the whole story. Coincidentally, a doctoral student in art history just wrote a paper about Endover and the plaza it sits in for one of my classes last month.)

As Luke and I were looking at the photos, I asked him: "Do you want to go see that one?" And he answered "Yeah!" So we biked home and had a quick dinner and then drove out to see The Cube.

At 2 1/2, Luke can already spin the Cube on his own. He especially liked playing chase around it, and he also liked climbing all over the concrete ledges and water fountain (turned off for the winter of course) nearby.

Today at daycare while he was getting dressed to go outside Lucas told all his friends about seeing The Cube. "I saw sculpture! Turned it!" Then the kids took a walk around the neighborhood to look for sculptures. They saw a frog sculpture in one yard, a metal archer in another, and some kind of metal and glass sculpture in another.

Like I said, Luke's daycare rocks.