Making A Forest

We use loose materials in our classroom on a daily basis. The children love to explore, create, and imagine as they work with our materials. Lately we have talked about mosaics and creating a picture or story with our work. Until today we had mostly heard about the beautiful pictures that each child want to share but today I observed a beautiful story! Here's todays story:

FD had worked on this mirror earlier in the morning. She sat quietly placing pieces of wood on the mirror, adding jewels as she worked. She worked slowly and methodically, stacking pieces of wood on top of each other and then placing one green tile on the top of each piece of wood. Later in the morning FD revisited her work and some friends joined her.

 FD: I'm making a forest.

GM: Ok, are these trees?

FD: You use the wood pieces and put jewels on top, mostly the green ones.

AC joins the girls in their exploration. He tries to put a yellow piece on top of the wood.

FD: No you have to put green ones on top.

AC: Ok, we need green ones.

FD: Then we'll make people, there's people playing in the forest.

 AC: I go to the forest. 

FD: Greens on top because they are the leaves.

 AGP: We all go to the forest!

FD: There's kids and lots of trees. There's no moms because it's school so only Willow Room is there and only teachers.

 AGP: My forest has lots of puddles. We can where our boots in the forest so we can jump in puddles. My mom as boots. 

 FD: It's raining in the forest so there's leaves and mud on the ground. I have a mud path! I need all the brown ones so I can make my path. Maybe there's a tree in the path just like in our forest.

These friends kept working until they felt satisfied that their forest was complete. FD looked at her creation and gave a little smile, then said, "I'm done!" and went to play in a new space. Once she left the other friends didn't last very long but for the time that they were there did quite a bit of superb work together!