Playing with chalk

We use chalk for everything-- making pictures for our elaborate stories, studying forms, writing lessons, playing games... and I love the Zen quality of it. Its impermanence allows us to change and grow and discover new things all the time. We're never stuck in the same rut. The impermanence forces us onward, so that we're constantly creating new worlds.

One of our favorite chalk activities is hopscotch. I was a hopscotch addict when I was in grade school. My best pal Carrie and I used to play hopscotch every day at recess, without fail. Of course the lines were a permanent white, and unchanged day in and day out. After all these years, I've come to find that drawing the hopscotch block is as much fun as playing the game itself. Sunburst loves to draw it, in a multitude of colors, and it has yet to look the same way twice. Lately she is very interested in making the jumping aspect of it harder, so she has been planting counters all over the board for added difficulty:

"How far can Mom jump? Hee, hee."

Moonshine finds her own way with the chalk. Sometimes she copies what we're doing, and other times she just explores the color changes. Last week she spent quite a bit of time drawing on the back step. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but then she informed me that it was a "map of the states." The U.S., through the eyes of a 4 year old, looks an awful lot like this:

The blue on the bottom left is Arizona, next comes the white blob, which is Texas. The yellow on the far right is South Carolina. Everything else is the midwest. We live in the red state, apparently, which isn't anywhere close to Arizona in real life... but a girl can dream.

She has pretty much covered everywhere she has been in the recent past, and I find it amazing to see how she's putting these pieces together in her mind and making sense of the world she knows. Wow.