Super Birds

I’m not sure what the motivating factor is, but my son sees poultry as superheroes.

Back in June, Harrison came home with an activity he had done at school. He has been studying birds this summer and apparently they were studying the birth cycle of chickens. The children colored each of the four steps—egg sitting there, egg slightly cracked, egg with baby chick starting to emerge and baby chick standing triumphant—and then were to cut them out and glue them in order. Pretty standard stuff at Montessori school.

Something—something—made my son look at this order of operations activity and decide that that chick was no mere baby chicken. It was super Super.

I like that he included hair and a cape. My boy is into the details, you see.

So today at the library, I shouldn’t have been surprised. We went back for story time—it was better today, but I just don’t know that we’re going to bother so much going to that specific activity. We’ll still go get books (more on those later!), but the story time just doesn’t seem to capture his imagination.

Except for drawing time, which is after story time. Harrison loves to draw and color. I’d like to say it’s because I’m an art teacher and he’s gotten so many lessons in it and he knows how important it is to life. It’s not, though. He’s just a kid who likes to draw. Everything. When we show him new movies, he usually feels compelled to draw the characters immediately after the show is over. During The Iron Giant, he asked me to stop the movie at the end so that he could draw the statue of the Giant that Dean has made. He’s all the time bringing home little cut up pieces of paper that have superheroes drawn on them.

So anyway, at story time today, the books were counting books so the coloring activity afterwards was a dot-to-dot. He drew it in well enough—little bugger had to show off and count backwards instead of frontwards, but he was probably the oldest kid in the room so I don’t know if that had anything to do with it. He gets it drawn (“Great job, Pal!” He’s a stickler for the praise!), colors the eyes red (mean duck, apparently), and the beak and feet are yellowed. At this point, the duck’s a little scary, but whatever. He likes weird stuff. He starts coloring the duck’s chest red—dunno why, just did—and eventually colors the whole thing red. I, the art teacher, tell him that he can make his duck any color he likes, which he likes to hear, and then he looks down at it and says, “Mom! I forgot to make his lighting!”

I, of course, have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s a duck. Quack. But he gets his yellow marker back out, adds the lightning bolts to the head and tries to add them to the chest. Have you ever tried coloring yellow marker over anything? No dice. So he gets the grey and colors Flash’s logo on the duck.

Phew! Superhero Fowl Emergency averted!

I think it’s quite a handsome duck, personally. ;)

So, books from the library today included Tedd Arnold’s Even More Parts and Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Wallendiner Hogan Logan Bogan Was Her Name. Man, that guy can make some cool kids’ books! I had never heard of him before, but read about him on another blog and now we’re all hooked on his goofy self.