I’ve asked several kids that over the past couple weeks.
Of course, none of them had… they corrected me quickly. “It’s SLEEPING beauty!”
“No,” I’d say. “It’s definitely sweeping beauty. And she was using a hearth broom like that one or that one (imagine me pointing to the brooms hanging on the wall) to sweep out the fireplace and that’s where the cinders came from. The cinders are what gave her her nickname, Cinderella, but she was really a sweeping beauty.”
I get a lot of groans and a few chuckles. That’s OK. I was working to engage and I think I did… let’s check.
“Now,” I ask, “who wants to sweep?”
A cacophony of “I do”s and a forest of waving hands….
As I watch the kids sweep a small pile of sand and old coffee grounds (easy to see) around the floor of the broom squire’s cottage, I know I engaged them… just for a second… you might say I swept them off their feet.
