We Did This (Leaving Our Mark With Charcoal)

We sit on the floor and revisit our work together. Who did this? Using a finger we trace the marks left on of the page. There are long ones, smudged ones, short marks, dark and light marks. The variety is endless and evolving. Every touch, with or without charcoal, changes the marks. We observe and discuss these communal offerings, sometimes asking who made this? Sometimes we are silent and trace the marks with our fingers. We revisit our experience. We lie on the floor and look up at our work. We flatten our faces to the wall and observe up close. We point out features of interest to each of us and invite others to observe our charcoal markings from previous days.

Interactions between an infant and a wood chip

As we observed our paper charcoal piece on the playground one of the infants collected a dark, wet wood chip from the ground. Replicating the use of charcoal, she attempted to draw with the wood chip on the paper. When the wood chip left no mark, she looked at the wood chip in her hand and back at the paper. She repeated the move to no avail, looked at the woodchip again and then threw it away.

If we observe slowly and attentively, we may get ideas about what we need to know with those marks. They are not just marks. There is something to them.

Charcoal on paper Wood chips on concrete

I’m impressed with how the infant  connected her experiences with charcoal to wood chips. It reminds me of what she did with the paper. She picked up a piece of paper, passed it to me, and took it back. She did the same thing over and over until she saw the drops of water on the paper. She tried several times to pick up the wet spots on the paper, but she couldn’t, so she left it.
With those experiences, she seems to be experimenting with a trial-and-error method, but watching her doing the same activity with paper, I learned a lesson for myself: “You can’t recreate everything that you see. “

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