Mop
ALWAYS ANOTHER ONE - *there is always something else a little bit odd, and each odd thing can have its own new rule.*
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Mop is a kind, calm friend with a soft teal scarf, and Mop is always holding some funny bit or bob. Mop never runs out of odd things. As soon as one broken toy is fixed, Mop says, "Ooh, here's another!"
Today Mop has a deck of picture cards.
"Let's play matching colours!" says a little friend.
They lay out the cards. Red, yellow, green, red, green, yellow...
"Wait," says the little friend. "Where are the blue ones?"
There are no blue cards at all. Not one. Every single blue card is missing.
"Oh dear," says the little friend. "Now we can't play."
Mop smiles, slow and cosy. "There's always something odd, isn't there? First the hole. Then the spinner. Now the blue cards. And you know what that means."
"We make a rule?"
"We make a rule," says Mop. "Every odd thing gets a rule."
They think. The little friend looks up at the sky through the window. "What if... the sky is our blue card? When you want blue, you point at the sky!"
Mop laughs a soft, happy laugh. "The sky is our blue card! That's a wonderful rule."
So they play. Red, match! Yellow, match! And when somebody needs blue, they point out of the window. "Blue!"
That's Mop's cosy idea.
There's always something odd - and every odd thing gets a rule!
A grown-up can play too! Take out some cards or blocks and hide one colour away. Play a matching game and make a rule for the missing colour together. Maybe it's something in the room that's that colour!
At the end, Mop gathers up the cards and tucks them away. "Tomorrow," Mop says with a twinkle, "I'll find something else that's odd." And the little friend can't wait, because odd things aren't a bother anymore. They're new games.
The OddBitsPals ensemble
Mop is part of OddBitsPals's distributed-narrative cast. Each character embodies a different curricular primitive; together they teach the full subject.
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OddBits
(Guide) loves what's broken — a toy that doesn't work is an invitation to invent the rule (constraint-as-invitation)
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Scrap
Brings a broken bit to fix — a board with a hole, a dice with a blank side (the broken constraint)
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Nib
Tries your invented rule and plays it WRONG, so you get to correct it — teaching the rule is how you know it (protégé loop)
