Radgirl's Portland Playground

Every year at A Sunny Place Learning Center, the preschoolers build a leprechaun trap.  It's not just a fun way to celebrate GreenDay, but so much happens when we look at the process of trap building. First, they have to learn about it.  What is a leprechaun.  What do they do?  Why do we want to trap one?  We dive into research by first making a list of what we already know.  This is like the warm up before you work out.  Once those pathways get working, it's easy to transition in what we want to learn about leprechauns.  The list included everything from 'are they green' to 'do they use toilets'. Through our research, we learned that they like to play tricks, they are silly, they are tricky, and if you catch one, you get to keep their pot of gold. Next, we have to start brainstorming trap ideas.  So many things are happening in these little brains now.  It's comparable to the moment man found fire.  Usually we spend an ent...

Willard Martin’s mosaic “The Continuity of Life Forms,” seen here at the zoo entrance circa 1968, was reinstalled last month at the zoo’s new education center. Photo by Anne Breeze, courtesy of the Oregon Zoo . After nearly 20 years spent languishing in obscurity, a classic Portland artwork is set to return to the public eye. “The Continuity of Life Forms” — a huge midcentury-modern mosaic by renowned Portland architect and artist Willard Martin — was reinstalled at the Oregon Zoo last month at a site near the old zoo entrance, where the iconic piece stood for more than 50 years. “This is a way of preserving the legacy of a local hero in addition to preserving part of the zoo’s history,” says Brent Shelby, one of the zoo’s project managers. “There will be a lot of nostalgia for those who visited the zoo prior to the late 1990s.” Originally installed at the entrance when the zoo moved to its current location in 1959, the striking mosaic greeted visitors for 40 years, be...