Pedagogist: Rachel Phillips 

Educators: Mrs. Inlee, Mrs. Stone* 

Children: Bailey, Sara, Ella, Robbie, Fianna, Jamie, Daniel, Amelia, Alisa, Mary, Luke 

With support from ECPN leadership team – B. Denise Hodgins and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw 

At Aspengrove, in the Island region of British Columbia, we** work with two groups of preschool children towards nourishing the relations amongst all living beings in our immediate ecological surroundings. By nourishing relations, we mean attending to our interconnected and entangled relationships with nonhuman others in the traditional lands of the Snaw-Naw-As and Snuneymuwx. Cultivating early childhood spaces in response to their ecological contexts is an important offering within the B.C. Early Learning Framework.  

A child named Bailey is immersed in exploring coloured water and plastic spiders, a common occurrence around Halloween in many Canadian early childhood education centres. Bailey poses a problem.

Bailey: “I want to draw a spider, but I don’t really know how.”

We share Bailey’s problem with a group of children and invite them to draw with spiders.

Following a series of conversations and careful observations of the plastic spiders in the room, the children proceed to draw spiders as they narrate emerging ideas.

Bailey: “Hmm, black, all black… He’s really small… He’s got his body here, lots of these legs coming out… The legs are so big!”

Sara counts out loud how many legs the spider has and carefully marks them on the paper.

Sara:“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Eight! My spider has eight legs. Do all spiders have eight legs? I need to draw all eight on my guy. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.”

Sara wonders about the “pinchy” looking parts.

Sara and Ella add pincers to their drawings.

Ella: “My spider has lots of eyes.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

On an outside walk, Alisa notices that the soccer net looks like a spider’s web. We take photos and revisit them in the classroom as the children continue to draw spiders and spiderwebs.

 

Robbie notices similarities between “spiderwebs” and snowflakes.

 

 

Mrs. Inlee:“We made a snowflake, and we noticed it looked like a web.”

Bailey: “Yes, I noticed that too. There’s lots of lines stuck together.”

Fianna: “Their webs keep them warm in the wintertime.”

Sara: “I see frost in their webs. Frost is like the snowflakes getting stuck in there.”

Jamie: “How do you get out of a spider web if you get stuck?”

Robbie: “The snowflakes show us what a good webber they (spiders) are.”

Shifting Spiderwebs

As the weather turns colder, the children notice that spiderwebs don’t have spiders.

Jamie: “I found this white web under there when I tripped over a rock.”

Daniel: “I don’t know where spiders go in the wintertime.”

Fianna: “Me neither!”

Bailey: “I dreamt about a spider when I was at home, but it was just a dream, you know.”

 

 

The group discussed where spiders might go in the wintertime. Some children speculated that spiders might travel to warmer places, like Mexico, or seek shelter inside people’s houses to stay warm.

Mrs. Stone responded by asking: “Do spiders get cold outside?”

Ella: “Spiders get cold outside, so they have to come into our house too. That’s how they get warm.”

Daniel: “I don’t think they get cold because they have their web to keep them warm”

Robbie: “They go inside people’s houses to get warm.”

Outside, children search for the spider we had previously found in the playground. They wonder how spiders find warmth, imagining the possibility of a giant spider web hidden somewhere that would offer warmth in the colder months.

Encountering Spiders

In the absence of spiders, we offer children a photo of a spider we had previously found weaving a web. Surprisingly, a problem returns.

Bailey: “I don’t know how to draw a spider anymore.”

The children work through the problem together, returning to ideas they had experimented with earlier in the year.

Robbie: “I forgot how to make a spider too, but I can start with the legs.”

Amelia: “I want to draw the legs, just the legs. I want to make rainbow ones. They go in and out and up and down….”

Jamie: “How do you draw a spider? Oh yeah, four legs!”

Uncertain of Jamie’s conclusion, Amelia suggests checking the number by counting the plastic spider’s legs.

 

Alisa: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I’m going to do a few more lines. There. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12! 12! He is a hairy spider.”

Children experiment with drawing spiders’ legs in different ways.

 

Mary: “Pink legs”

 

 

 

 

Amelia: “A big spider with lots of legs.”

 

 

 

 

Daniel: “Slow legs.”

 

 

 

 

Daniel: “There’s the legs: line, line, line.”

 

 

 

 

Luke: “Fast legs.”

 

 

 

Amelia: “Rainbow legs.”

 

 

Spiders on the Move

Drawing spider legs inspires the children to create 3D versions of spiders.

Amelia: “I want to make a spider, but I want to do it a bit different this time. I need string or tape.”

We offer children fishing line and other materials that bring movement to the spiders in the drawings. Spider sculptures move with the children.

 

Daniel: “He’s doing dance, he’s dancing, look, he’s dancing.”

Bailey: “Look, he’s moving, he is really moving!”

Robbie: “I can take my spider anywhere.”

 

We offer here an incomplete instance of how we might begin to nourish child-animal relations by working situatedly and attending to temporal circumstances. We take the presence of spiders as a pedagogical moment that allows us to nurture the art of attention through drawing and movement.

 

 

 

* Children and educators’ names are pseudonyms.

** In this field note, “we” refers to pedagogists and educators at times and to children, educators, and pedagogists at other times.