Sometimes it's good to shake things up a bit. Shake us out of our complacency, our routines, our habits. Instead of walking the same way every time we go for a walk (our family is bad like that), we've taken a page out a new book and tried something novel: the dicewalk!
The book is The Guerilla Art Kit by Keri Smith and I'm in love with the ideas and the author -- in the teenage "I wanna be like her" kind of way.
I'm not a guerilla anything by any stretch of the imagination though, and when choosing a first activity to try from the book, I picked one that didn't involve putting myself out there (some of the others ideas include a wish tree, a public chalkboard, signs, making slogan stickers, sending guerilla mail, installation art, a sound collage). But maybe, just maybe... M
aybe this book will help me push the boundaries of my comfort zone.
But we started with the dicewalk, an activity that involved only ourselves and our own interactions and perceptions of our environment. Maia cut out the die (under the table with th
e baby eating something off the floor in the corner).
I had planned to do it myself, but she assumed this was for her, and I was happy to let her t
ake ownership.
After gluing the die closed and letting it dry for the shortest amount of time we could get away with, we headed off on the first of three dicewalks of the day.
Every time we came to an intersection, Maia would roll the die to find out which way we would go.
The dicewalk took us in new directions, on roads and sidewalks we hadn't explored before. Maia thought it was the best thing since pb&j!
If you want to go on your own dicewalk, you can download the template for the arrow die here at FamilyFun. I found out about Keri Smith and her books from an article about her in the current issue of FamilyFun magazine. In case you're considering picking up a copy, the ideas in that article are worth the price of the magazine!
Happy dicewalking!
