Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/mens-hats-and-red-shoes/5021584/
Remembering
It was the last week of nursery school and the children were helping me, their teacher, clean up. Juanita, Joe, Malcolm, and Rose were helping in the dramatic play area. Joe picked up a gray hat and said, "Hey! Remember when we built the boat with the hollow blocks in here and we sailed across the ocean to find treasure?" He re-shaped the hat into a pirate hat. "Oh, yeah," said the other children, each imagining the boat as it had looked then. They were quiet as they each remembered the weeks the dramatic play area had been transformed into the pirate ship. We had built on children's interest in boat building and treasure hunting to introduce faraway places they might discover. We sat in the boat for snack so long one day that children began to ask, "Are we there yet?"
As they each remembered more, I said, "Do you know whose hat that was before it came to our school?" And I told them the story of my grandfather's hat. I took the hat and pinched my fingers on the back of a chair to show the children how the little clip ...