The One Legged Woman Who Dyed Some Eggs (and Celebrated Pysanky and Polacco)

I've become aware in the realest sense of the workings of the vertebrate spine. My spine to be precise.

(Speaking of Birds and units of study ( incidentially, I have a great set of pictures from my recent visit to the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology) )

Did I mention that our theme is Wings and Things, and that we are studying bugs and birds? Well obviously it's a rather broad theme to be followed by the mandated "Our Earth" which will be lovely with Earth Day coming up after break.
We are everywhere with this unit. (With another incidentally coming into my wandering mind, a great spot in my hometown of Morgantown, WV used to be Wings and Things they had wonderful blue cheese dip for fries and wings.)
So Top of the morning we are.

I'm writing up my last day Friday before break on a nice chill CA morning with frozen toes and the bluster of the sunny yet very chill day. And I liked this link to Irish butterflies. How fascinating that Ireland evolved such beautiful butterflies. It's a crazy link fest blog post day, with a little real worrying too personally about things going on in my spine and physical health, I suppose I often distract myself writing here and thinking through my notes on the week in teaching.
Spring Break has come. To a tired first grade Sheltered Immersion teacher.

It's a stretch to do this in any great way, or short way- it's my issue I suppose I'd like to talk with someone and that seems to require of them their time sadly, but this Wings and Things unit has included getting caterpillars, (that I must go photograph over at school today, if I remember) , (they are close to chrysalis making), involved our long involved Very Hungry Caterpillar celebration of 40 years of Eric Carle's cool book with his interesting insect and bug books, and our related class book making too. It includes lots of efforts in our Our Bugs unit, Bugs book making with great resources deployed from Reading Rainbow, to lessons with my visiting CalTechian daughter, to all the net connected projects, sites, to books, and it's been great. If sounding very choppy here, well, my apologies. It all works somehow in the classroom. Yet to come, umm, aerodynamics. Why things fly.

We need to do a bug study after break, boy am I thinking about how cool that will be if we just watch and count every day, or once a week, a patch of ground to see what's happening in bug world there. Wish we started in September. Luckily we found one study done with children that we looked at on-line. It was a bug count looking for year at a patch of ground, and counting what they saw, in this taped off square on a yard. Young kids, the data gathered was phenomenal. It was involved of course and it generated lots of inquiry. You had to see this. Oops I'm at home forgetting the look-up, so of course I can't find it.....to show you too. It amazes me what I lose sometimes. I'll try and add it when I get over there and figure it out.
I'll try to find it. Well, I found this...instead. It's a set of very good lessons on insects, very cool.

BE A BUG

Okay, this is sort of unrelated, but check out making your own compound eye! What fun at this egg carton time of the year.
I've been enjoying these units of study. Enjoying our making.
Especially the feeling that learning is connected to doing.

Of course with first graders I teach this material, on vertebrates/ invertebrates but at nearly 50 I'm gaining insights as my own vertebrate spine becomes more goofy than it was a month ago and my leg gives way to the flopping bunny look. The foot drops, and I'm dragging a leg.
No feeling in it.
Trying to keep teaching through a truely horrible month, as if I'm not losing the ability to walk. Perfect look for the season I suppose. The drag to Spring Break, do the bunny. Why I make that connection I do not know. i suppose the limping feels like hopping.

Both the expansion of the syrinx and the debilitating herniation of the L4/5 disk combine to make sitting agony and my leg on the right side fairly close to inoperable enough to rule out ballroom dance, it is finally out of the question. Clogging will go too. And I'll never be quite able to tell you if it's relief not to feel one of my first graders tap tap, taping on my leg, or just horror realizing looking down i couldn't feel them, that I felt nothing and now they can do something they have forever loved, get your attention the immediate way.

Not even minor annoyance can I find in this now, with bigger problems just making me feel overwhelmed and flooded.... But this last week or so saw the severe back pain kind of turned into numb trick leg issues and I still haven't MRI'd the upper spine or the lower with the contrast they need apparently, they ordered it awhile back, not gotten to any specialists, with what seem to be worsening signs. I can't face the MRI out of sheer claustrophobia, plus it hurts me to lay flat to do that. Call me chicken, it'll fit the theme, Wings and Things. I just can't do it. And i dream of torso's cut off and balls of lightening flying from a sky like missles as I stand around a Picasso museum structure set into mountains with rocks. Dreams of losing control I think of my limbs. Ones of real fear, it just happens in a moment. Syringomyelia is a horror.

The doctor part is more complicated. I have one on leave. And I need to see someone before the June appointment the neurological surgeon had open. I'm not sure June is a good idea, too long away, though I'd like to wait until ten years from now- this latest week was scary. But this is how I got to Spring vacation. Lugging this enormous numb leg out the door, after deciding to dye some eggs and look at Psyanky, read Rechenka's Eggs, watch a Reading Rainbow and fill in my overdue data sheets. Feeling a child facing an impossibility.

(Boy was I late just writing in the data on students to the master form, I'd done the battery of tests weeks ago. There's lots of progress, but all I could see was the road ahead and some of the the kids not where I need them to be. Or am ordered to be by state and fed regulation. It's really hard to focus on gain. i have too many that I worry about. And it all seems to be within their development of language, something they really have shown terrific progress in learning. But many of my class started the year without English, really next to none, coming in from a dropped program so their kinder was in Spanish. We didn't even know the program was blown up until last April so these kids had a lot on thin shoulders. Me too, on fat shoulders.
Still there are the 100 sight words and the monster list of things to "test" and as I'm failing mine in spinal nightmare, I feel each lower score as my own.)

So I filled it in. Turned it in. Thank goodness. Thought about how a few students just are not making or bridging into word and meaning making, not reading well at all, not yet.
And you feel that as a terrible weight as their first grade teacher. I'm debating a few retentions. It's too important to let them move on too fast and fail. i'm just statingthat we need to clear the reading hurdle.


Meanwhile at home yesterday my 80 plus mom was washing the entire tile floor and doing the windows, windexing and cleaning tracks, a day after she hardboiled 180 eggs so the kids would have something to dye. And doing my laundry. Which makes me feel guilt. And color they did. With the care that really just left maybe one broken. Amazing job.

If nothing else could be said they were very cooperative egg dyeing and for the most part no one spilled the dyes. Yeah!
That's quite a thing, we used five sets of dye. Of that cheap grocery store stuff. It's been weeks of talking about eggs and the amazing world of things that come from eggs. So that fit in interestingly.
I'm not up to Pysanky with little ones, but I am considering it this weekend for myself, and I hope my own kids. I'm not great at it, but I love the art.

In the Reading Rainbow on Eggs that we watched, Patricia Polacco, the children's author shares as a youngster she was learning disabled in reading, what she could do was draw.
And she learned Pysanky from her Russian Babushka, grandmother. Ukrainian. She states somewhere close to the end of a demonstration of the art, "It is said as long as somewhere in the world a Pysanky is being created, the world will never end." I really appreciated that. It resonates with the lover of making. The lover of story.
When you read about this craft, that is such a beautiful art, it's such a nice kind of thing to learn about another people's making. And to learn of her too. The kids loved it.
She preserves her family traditions through her book making, her turning to the different pieces of her family quilt, to look at what she came from, what she recalls. Listen to this beautiful woman in this piece I found that I hope embeds here. She is brilliantly telling you about who she is, and it echoes in my work. This woman's books have so aided me in my work reading, teaching with children. She talks about her reading disability, you just must play this piece....wow.







Here are some nice links to the kind of egg decorating I did when I was young and like to repeat each spring.

LearnPysanky.com: How to Make Ukrainian Easter Eggs (pysanky)

Pysanky - Ukrainian Easter Eggs

Pysanky Showcase

Pysanka - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pysanky - The Ukrainian Art of dyeing Easter Eggs.

Those are just from using a search on google, there are quite a few to investigate.

I learned this art of pysanky several ways.
In malls, in West Virginia I'd see things demonstrated in the halls.
So I often went to our "mall" up on the hill (an 11 mile walk, but Dad took me mostly until I was a teen, or I just most often rode the bus ) to see what was up there on display. A funny part of who I am. Saw it too in some craft festivals in West Virginia when I was young.
I saw the eggs being made as a part of life, I recall it clearly when I was very young. You won't make this I don't think, unexposed to it as normal.
At nine I bought the supplies from several of the excellent local art and craft stores that then were run in Morgantown, W.Va. One in particular was in an older Victorian, wasn't there so long but while it was, I loved to roam there. I literally tried everything if I could get the money and do it. Mom would sometimes feed me a twenty.
It went a long way then. I realize now I was raised in a time, by a mom, and certainly in freedom enough to go shopping in town by myself, to feel like finding things like this to do, and I did this constantly.

My life has always been a curious one and I think a teacher opens this by being willing to do things, not just set limits and exact Standards, narrow, as so often written by those whose lives are not so rich but rather rigid and driven by control and measurement. In fact I've never met an expansive person in a meeting about student curricular design, I've met incredible rigid rule driven monitors. Not fun at all. Oh well, wandering thought. Sorry it's this morning. I gave myself permission to be myself.

I'd say by nine there was very little of my life not involved in making and learning new art forms. I loved it because I also importantly took art classes as well after school from Sharon Goodman. She changed my life. An artist. She is the miracle of my life. The one who opened my doors. So I learned things there too. I learned of thinking differently.
(How to love wax, drawing, mark, immediacy, the love of being here, now, doing.)

Pysanky was taught in the school I was first hired to teach, Cheat Lake in Morgantown West Virginia, as a 5/6 art teacher in 1983. It was taught in the junior high, by Adelaide Rush, the junior high art teacher. I already knew the skill, so that was exciting, but I refined an understanding of teaching it watching her. She really did an excellent job bringing to the children a variety of the locally known arts. I'm always trying to do this, as I can now in a far too restricted a time educationally. The kids I saw doing pysanky adapted into it their own images as well as exploring the traditional symbols, or so I'd see it, as I bopped down the hall.
I had no room to work in, in those first two years of teaching, before I came to California. That was one reason I left. I had a cart and a closet. So that was all-no budget for me- just construction paper -that was really her storage closet, this exterior hallway place. I would stand in it, with the doors closed, waiting to roll into classrooms feeling I was hidden, and she wasn't going to share space with a younger teacher that was now providing arts to a school way too full bringing in younger grades she could not service. West Virginia provide art and music instruction with real dedication. Thank you for that. It was a job of feeling unsure.
But I did enjoy her work, wondering if my presence didn't make her uncomfortable, it made me feel interloping. I know I'd have felt that way if another teacher was stuck on a cart in the halls while I had an enormous art room. Oh well, memories to roam this morning. I seem to be wandering the halls again.

Actually a interesting way to approach teaching pysanky is through teaching pattern and the geometric design. Because it is geometry, on an ovoid, it has always fascinated me. It's hard to do. Another person at my school now crafts this ovoid shape with string into the most beautiful decorated egg shapes I've ever seen. She makes things so amazing its not captured here in words. But I forget the name of the art and can't find it either, I'm pretty sure she stated it was from Japan. I did find this amazing site of egg art.

With this art you enter folk history with so much rich story tradition.
It may not be your belief system of course, of course, but it is fascinating cultural tradition. And it's interesting seen as reflecting a people through time. Somehow I honor this in craft. Always. And beyond that fun for the use of beeswax, the resist, the charm of revealing the design at the end, it's so fun to do. But no video better presents it than that Reading Rainbow by Patricia Polacco.

Her book is a lovely folktale. Her own.
Rechenka's Eggs.

After we read the story, and watched it read...it's a really nice tale of a goose saved by an older woman, a babushka, that decorates these eggs for a yearly competition until a goose found and saved from hunters tips her basket of prize winners, but then a miracle happens.
I'll leave it to your reading.

We used our projector and looked on Flickr at sets of Ukrainian eggs, looked at my books, talked about the egg traditional designs.



We also worked on defining what designs are, and then seeing that design element within this tradition, and how we can use math in creating divisions, how we can repeat patterns and measure. But since candles, hot wax, layers of dye seem a little too much for 6 year olds,( though I have taught 9 year olds) I tried another medium they like for its immediacy. So we did giant chalk images. I liked this. Beautiful.

(This one he dedicated to Mexico)

They actually used Ukrainian designs to create their design. That's interesting to me. Insightful. On a day we probably moved too rapidly, so in another form I'll revisit designing within an oval or a circle, or with geometric design. Pacing it slower.

Possibly in a mosaic, I intend to do in awhile. Somehow. It's good to move skills into different media.

So how do you make a Pysanky??

Look:

These tutorials amaze me, as much of the net amazes me always. As a child once I got an idea I then had to read books, or find people, or read kits, or experiment and watching I recall hammering through these issues trying to learn how to do these eggs. All of it here to "see." Wow. I was always learning something, (silk screening was terrific learning foul ups in my garage). Funny but I don't think I learned from all that much direction on these eggs, not a formal lesson certainly on Pysanky, but probably standing at a fair or craft booth for hours taking it in and then going home and every year revisiting in spring hammering away at doing it. I still am pretty lousy actually. And it involved a lot of trial and error.

There seems to be so little of this kind of life now for kids, but that's just my perception.

So ....My partner teacher Heidi designed and brought down the bunny bags, her kids, and off we hopped into egg dyeing. Here's the whole show. One that was a nice hour in the afternoon mostly.