what they see around them, always alert and ready to point out, remark on and have some fun on the basis of the small everyday events that happen to spring up around us. “Look, Javier has come with very short hair today and he’s sitting alongside Lola, who has the longest hair in the whole school.” “All of us sitting at this table, have the letter P in our names.” “Today it’s my turn to be ‘first’ and on top of that, I’m wearing new sneakers.” “All of the girls except one have their hair in pigtails.” “My mother is wearing a white scarf and so is Paula’s.” “In this class, there are two people whose fathers were born in Brazil.” “My ruler is 40 cm long, the same as Elena’s, and they are the longest we have...” This is why I liked what happened today when I was reading to my students about the different periods of the painter Mondrian in his evolution as an artist. At first, he painted as a realist: landscapes, flowers, still lifes, some portraits; he used a great many colours, and mixed them... Then he began to loathe green; he tried painting in points, then with smudges of colour, like an impressionist, and from then on he began to venture into Cubist representation, until he became a wholly abstract painter with his straight lines and pure, simple colours. As we talked about the changes that Mondrian experienced, Álvaro remarked that he too had changed a lot, because last year he used to yell and disturb the others and now he didn’t do so any longer. After that, everybody began to identify their many changes. And that’s when I realized that through the game that we enjoy so much of looking for coincidences, we
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