Today it was my assignment to pick up the five-year-old granddaughter at the local Montessori school. We walked home together. It's a ten minute walk but it took us more than forty minutes. Here's why.
There was a patch of frozen snow on the ground. Ella pretended to skate back and forth on it for a few minutes. After a while she happened to push some lumps of ice onto the sidewalk and decided to see how far she could kick them. When the ice disintegrated, she went back for more clumps to practice her kick upon. She repeated this four or five times. But finally, searching for more ice, she found a black and white feather (she collects feathers), which she closely inspected and gave to me to carry. After that she looked at a number of leaves both on the ground and hanging upon the low branches; she gathered a few of last year's brittle brown oak leaves. Next she came upon a small flock of English sparrows who were pecking at some seed; she chased them off but waited to see how long it would take them to return. She decided to add to her rock collection: she found a beautiful, potato-size rock that I was allowed to carry home. "Could I open it with a knife? I'd like to see inside it?" Then it was time to dance on a brick retaining wall. Finished with that activity, she found two hunks of packed snow and scraped them together. "It's beautiful music," she said. She stopped to practice her whistling, a newly acquired skill. Then came an experiment: what happens when clumps of snow are rubbed on the trunk of a pear tree. And so on.
Ella's world: so various, so beautiful, and so new!
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