Where One Man’s Trash Is Preschoolers’ Art Material
At Beginnings Nursery School, Alexandra Lehrer, 5, center, held a Little Red Riding Hood puppet made from recyclables. More Photos >
- By WINNIE HU
Published: May 31, 2009
These found objects are not lost. They have a purpose.
Trash Gets a Second Chance
Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
Robin Koo, a studio art teacher, with LPs to be repurposed for art projects. More Photos »
In bulging trash bags and recycling bins, they make their way to the fourth-floor attic of a brownstone one block east of Union Square: bottle caps and wine corks, wood scraps and pebbles, vinyl records and even someone’s dental X-rays.
This is the Materials Center at Beginnings Nursery School, where things that outlive their original use come to be cleaned, sorted and repurposed for children’s art projects and life lessons about second acts. The center started out as a dumping ground for old class projects but evolved into an ever-changing repository of odds and ends that inspires creative work of its own.
Plastic VHS cases from Kim’s Video and Music in the East Village double as class art, filled with lids, ribbons and buttons. LPs still spin — as the base of handmade carousels. A bicycle wheel found near the United Nations hangs in a stairwell, its spokes interwoven with festive ribbons brought in by students.
A class of 4- and 5-year-olds recently turned a pile of corks into a fleet of boats that the children tried out in a fountain in Madison Square Park.
“Every school has its own version of a supply closet, but I don’t think this is the same thing,” said Robin Koo, a studio art teacher at Beginnings.
With thousands of loose objects on display, the Materials Center is organized as precisely as a research lab. Metals, plastics, wood and fabrics each have a designated section. Natural materials overflow from bookcases, including seashells, snakeskin coils and an unidentified animal skull that mysteriously showed up last week in a Pampers wipes box.
Beginnings Nursery spent less than $3,000 to create the center last year after buying the brownstone where it has occupied the two bottom floors since 1984. The bright, airy attic — once an office for the Union Square Greenmarket — was spruced up with leftover classroom furniture and sky-blue paint.
Jane Racoosin, director of Beginnings, said the found objects were used to encourage children to represent their ideas through exploration, part of the Reggio Emilia educational approach that has been adopted by a growing number of American preschools. Teachers stop by the Materials Center every day, with no limit on what they can take back to their classrooms. The preschool has 210 students, ranging in age from 18 months to 5 years.
Ms. Koo and four other teachers run the Materials Center and manage the flow of donations — and scavenged treasures — from staff members, parents and a dozen or so local businesses. The five teachers are paid a total of $17,000 a year on top of their regular salaries for their work at the center.
Irving Mill restaurant, owned by the mother of a Beginnings student, sent over old menus and wine and Champagne corks. A teacher’s husband, who works as a contractor, donated bales of cotton from a museum exhibit and cut-out fiberboard circles from a fashion runway. A father who owns a music production company brought in vinyl records and CDs that were otherwise headed for the landfill.
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” said Ms. Koo, who has discovered bags left outside her classroom door. “We definitely get things we have to turn away.”
She means throw away. Like the four hotel-size jars of jam, the three doll-size mariachi hats and the stack of smelly yogurt cups and bottle caps that someone did not bother to wash. As a rule, Ms. Koo cleans an object only if it is interesting and the center does not already have it.
Dawn Eig, a mother of two, said her daughter’s baby food jars had been used in class by her son, Oliver, 5, to mix paints, sort shapes and pack homemade cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving.
“I love it, because the children really get a sense of reusing objects and how important that is,” she said.
In a classroom the other day, 4- and 5-year-olds were building with blocks — along with cardboard tubes, wooden spools and packaging foam from the Materials Center. Across the room, the tale of Little Red Riding Hood was unfolding with hand puppets pieced together from recyclables, against a bright blue backdrop that had clouds made of chunks of cotton.
Afterward, Alexandra Lehrer, 5, pointed out that Little Red Riding Hood’s head came from a plastic cup, her ears from cut-up egg cartons and her hands from Champagne corks.
“I like building stuff,” she said. “If you throw everything away, there will be just a big pile of garbage, and you won’t have anything to make collages with.”
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