It's All Being Used

In response to yesterday's post, a couple readers, reacting to photos of children emptying glue bottles, asked me to comment on "waste."

When I first started teaching, this drove me crazy; the urge in some children to just squeeze until it's all gone. Not only did it strike me as wasteful, but it also tended to overwhelm whatever else was going on at the art table that day. I've never been in favor of bossing kids around, even as a neophyte teacher, so I knew I had to approach the "problem" creatively.

But first, I had to ask myself, why do they squeeze the glue and paint bottles until they're empty? I suppose I could come up with a list of things they may or may not be teaching themselves in the process -- cause and effect, air pressure, targeting, trajectory, gravity, viscosity, color mixing, whatever -- but I was, and still am, satisfied with knowing that if a child engages robustly in any kind of play, he's exploring something he really needs to understand. And when a lot of kids of a certain age do something, consistently, over years, such as emptying squeeze bottles, then whatever they're learning, it's probably something pretty important. It's enough for me to know that.

So, being a clever adult person, I put squeeze bottles in the sensory table, along with water, and let the kids knock themselves out, figuring we would do this for a few weeks, then when the glue bottles reappeared the kids would have learned what they needed to learn about emptying bottles and be ready for something else. I let it run for a couple of weeks, waiting for a day during which our little bottle squeezing activity lay largely fallow. Figuring this was a sign that it was out of their collective systems, I then reintroduced glue bottles. But no, what the kids taught me that day is the great truth that glue is not water, and as a different thing, it also needs to be fully explored by emptying bottle after bottle. Back to the drawing board.

As I was contemplating our glue bottles one day, trying to crack this particular nut, I noticed that some of them had larger holes than others. As I examined further, I even found one loose screw-on top with no hole at all. Wait a minute! This is how they all start -- the teacher gets to decide how big the holes are by how much of the tip gets snipped off. How about just ordering new glue bottles, then giving them tiny, tiny holes so the kids have to really work to get the glue out? Then they won't waste so much. Hmm? Hmm? Smart, huh?

A week later, equipped with what I couldn't help but think of as my "miserly" glue bottles, I was feeling pretty confident. The first several kids, after much effort, eeked out a  few drops or perhaps a thin stream of glue. Then one girl handed me her bottle, saying, "It's too hard. You do it." Then others did the same. Okay, so maybe the holes needed to be a little bigger. I carefully trimmed a bit from the top of each glue bottle until the children were no longer trembling as they squeezed. Some of them still were unable to manage it, so I trimmed a bit more . . . Well, needless to say, before too much time had passed, we were again emptying bottle after bottle.

Alright then, this was going to have to go up a notch. If we need to learn about squeezing glue from bottles, then we were going to learn about squeezing glue from bottles. This was the advent of our first glue table, a place where it's important to empty glue bottles if you really want our garbage art to hold together. It's impossible to waste glue at the glue table.

Since then, I've learned that if you really want to use glue, and want kids to focus on something other than emptying glue bottles, and you don't want to boss them around, you just put the glue in a small dish with a paint brush. I do it not because I'm concerned about waste, however, but rather because some kids appreciate things when they don't involve pools of glue.

If it's too valuable to be used in excess, we don't bring it into the classroom. I want children to be able to explore and experiment freely at school -- that's what makes a play-based curriculum work. When it comes to educational materials, like glue, it's hard for me to think in terms of waste because it seems to me it's all being used in the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. That's what the kids have taught me about squeeze bottles and glue.

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