The Girl With The Brown Crayon

The Crirlwith the Brown Crayon This bookhas beenawardedHarvard UniversityPress'sannual prizefor an outstandingpublicationabout educationand society, establishedin 1995 by the Virginiaand WarrenStoneFund. By the same author White Teacher Wally's Stories Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner Mollie Is Three: Growing Up in School Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter You Can't Say You Can't Play Kwanzaa and Me Vivian CTussinPaLey The G-irl with the Brown Crayon Harvard UniversityPress Cambridge,Massachusetts London, England Copyright © 1997 by the President and Fellowsof Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Fourth printing, 2001 Cover illustration taken from Frederickby Leo Lionni. Copyright © 1967 and renewed 1995 by Leo Lionni. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Libraryof CongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Paley,Vivian Gussin, 1929The girl with the brown crayon / Vivian Gussin Paley. p. em. ISBN 0-674-35439-7 (doth) ISBN 0-674-35442-7 (pbk) 1. Language arts (Preschool)-Illinois-Chicago-Case studies. 2. Children's literature-Study and teaching (Preschool)-IllinoisChicago-Case studies. 3. Preschool children-IllinoisChicago-Books and reading-Case studies. 4. Lionni, Leo, 1910. 1.Title LBI140.5.L3P35 1997 372.6-dc20 96-34708 Designed by Gwen Frankfeldt To Irving Preface The events recorded here are true, though they seem, in retrospect, something I may have dreamed. Yethow could the children and I, even with our combined dreams, have imagined Reeny's song? "Once upon a time, uh-huh uh-huh, they was a mouse name Frederick, uh -huh uh -huh!" Swish,swish,hands on hips. "Uh-huh uh-huh.I told you so,uh-huh uh-huh.Frederico!" Reeny is a five-year-old black girl who falls in love with a mouse called Frederick and then makes us think about him and his creator as if everything that happens in school depends on our deliberations. "GUt~SS what, guess what!" she declares. "This is Leo Lionni we doing!' "Who is Leo Lionni?" visitors ask, looking at the children's giant-sized paintings, each bearing the author's name in uneven print. "Our storyteller," we reply, smiling our secret smiles, knowing that something remarkable is taking place. And none too soon. Incredible as it seems to me, after more than three decades my final year in the classroom has come. I shall need a miracle to sustain me for the days when my feet no longer carry me to Room 284. Preface This is my last chance to follow the children into unexplored territory, and never has there been a child so willing to lead as Reeny. How does she know that the whole point of school is to find a common core of references without blurring our own special profiles? Or, to put it into her words, «How come every the whole time I be with one person for a long time they 'mind me of a Leo Lionni somebody?" «Do I remind you of a Leo Lionni somebody?" I ask, for I have wondered somewhat anxiously over the years about my identification with one of his characters, a bird named Tico. Reeny studies my face. «He might be not thinking about old people," she says, though the issues in his animal fables she has begun to memorize are ones I have struggled with all my life. Perhaps this will be the year I discover which Leo Lionni somebody I am. At the very least we will have invented a classroom no one has ever seen before, and this has always been miracle enough for me. In the telling o