Today We Watched a Beautiful Video

On Eric Carle Picture Writer VHS.

Which goes nicely with The Art of Eric Carle.

In this video Eric Carle talks about his lifes work as a children's book illustrator and author.

I am so pleased that I bought the VHS many moons ago. 1990 or so. Playing it to my 1^st grade today was a treat. Carle is so gentle, so direct and insightful. If I could choose someone to know, to spend a little time understanding, or talking to about my life in teaching, in art and my current concerns about education-it would be him. Though I’m pretty sure that offer might not sound so hot on the other end.

I still can have my heroes. I've never had a group of children in teaching, including my children today, become anything but very calm and simply serene in his video presence and just be able to relax and listen. I am planning to make student books so this initiates that . Animal stories. He talks beautifully, completely, simply but in a way that reveals his intelligences both creative and intellectual. Carle is talking to children about his bookmaking. He reminds me of my image of a “good friend”. The children made a connection with this friend they know well from books.

My students struggle with English being 2nd language learners, but it was fine listening, we had understanding. And, yes, I assert I just "know". Sometimes the talk of someone using language like an art form is like this. It is imminently understandable.

We have been reading in our classroom for two weeks a great many Carle books at “You Pick It” time. Preparing the road I'm going down for this new project. I have been highlighting his books also because the children read well enough now to follow up our shared reading and then be able to read the book on their own. To then listen to him talk about his bookmaking via this video, his process as an artist and to actually see his incredible studio, to watch him make his "papers", then work on a caterpillar collage while speaking out to the children, it rather fulfills the definition of a teacher home run. Quite the impact. It's just lovely.

Carle talks I think to the adult listener about his books as having different, deepening levels and he is satisfied with children making contact with them on their own level. It is a point he makes directly, they should not be forced into a perspective to frame one of his stories. He comments that a child seeing the mouse in the counting book, over seeing the counting as the meaning, may well be "a future storyteller" over "the mathematician". These are the gentle, insightful, expanding comments he makes on children's "levels". Wow. Carle is just so very good.

This is not an artist working in wild last minute process, let me assure you. So often of late I listen to the disparagement of art as we see it shorn from public education as a lesser process . A video such as this stands up to such simple minded heat. Every aspect from his conception of a new book, writing, the art process in illustration, consideration of story element, execution of design is very structured.
He speaks a bit about his artistic decision trees. I marveled at how he cut all his collage pieces precisely from overlaid drawn templates. Drawn on giant tracing paper and fitted over his painted tissue. This planning process I learned by watching him create an image. And my class fully expects now to try his process for themselves. That of course is my teaching them that images take thought, planning, execution. Not a quick and speedy thing-which is necessary as we gear up to make our books. It was so natural to him working from this template, it must be how he does it. I would have expected a much freer process. A process less tied to that template. It shocked me. He does remind the audience of how considered his books are in the making.

Carle says he starts with this kernel of a concept taken from his child memory. He notes that most of us lose childhood.Lose these thoughts and connections to children and their lives. Our child's memory is 90 % lost, his "maybe 89%", he stated. But in the film I realized that he conceives a book on a much more involved level than the surface idea say of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, his is a process considering human life and growth. Change. Evolving. Transformation becomes visual. Looking at the life a child senses he or she must grow to know and/or to do. To be touched by the books in differing ways by children in different phases of maturation is a part of how he sees his books working for children. He is structuring this, the possibility for different interpretations. Children will "see" based on where they are on varying continuum's. I wrote down his exact words to quote only to leave them at school. But I do recall this in the film. And, interestingly, I started to cry and for much of the movie the children were affected by my reaction.

Art and children are where I live. I design lessons and opportunities for growth on many levels. It's a part of teaching being taken from me. He tells my teacher life, really, he tells the children that it is okay to see your truth in his pages. You are unique, not a pathology. No test to correct here. No concept of that way of looking. This is everything to me. Life , their life, is a venture of a door being opened into the future.

I can also hear him saying that his books are part toy, part book bridging the gulf between home (where it is safe and secure) and school. It is so hard to place our children into school.
I really want all parents facing this day of leaving to WATCH this video. I'd place it in their hands in a New York minute. It's about what children are going to do in the trip into the school world and he is so sensitive to this transition into school.And his brief talking about school frames what school can be for children. What it must be aware of in order to grow healthy adults. I've spent my career just there, on that boundary. Being the connection between those two worlds. To me it is a magic, artful place and a giant honoring responsibility. His books really are part toy, part book helping us to ease the child into the school world. I so understand his talk here.

Carle shares in the film the story of his going to kindergarten where he cannot recall his teacher, can't see her face in mind's eye. But she called his mother to come the school. In my day such a call would naturally evoke in me the thought I must be "in serious trouble". I had to laugh out loud. He was afraid he was “in trouble”. He does recall from that kinder world something very vital, the big school art papers and bright colored paints and fat brushes which he still uses in creating his papers to then turn into collage. She went past “Eric” paintings on the wall into the room, she did not know they were his, and the teacher told the parent he was talented and to nurture this in him. His teacher opened a window, this faceless teacher with beautiful paints, made them aware. Just to hear this tears were flowing, my kids bringing me tissues and holding on listening. It is so affecting. It changed his future. It changed a parental perspective. As I listened I thought of what I try to do as a public school teacher every day. Everyday.

He talks to the children about three books that are real favorites, The Hungry Caterpillar, The Very Busy Spider and The Quiet Cricket. Respectfully they are about aspects of life. The first the story of transformation. Then the spider representing a life of work, the cricket book is a book about love. The cricket gains his skills in time. After learning lessons and growing up. All three are beautifully told and shared in the film.

In all this was such a treat to show today. I hope that this goes to DVD and is again shared in classrooms celebrating literacy and book making rather than test taking and with parents seeking things that are very meaningful with their children who love Carle books.