ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with vibrant tempera paint and is smudged by the strokes of watercolor that drenched classrooms for months at a time. Educators, researchers, and children encountered paint, a common material in early childhood classrooms, as if children were meeting it for the first time. Paint became something to think with rather than a tool to develop toddlers' sensory skills. In this way, paint acted as both verb and noun. The chapter traces just a few of complex interactions among the elements of assemblages formed around paint. An assemblage, Bennett writes as she borrows from Deleuze and Guattari, is like a 'human-nonhuman working group' where each element is in relationship with the others. The assemblage reaches toward a becoming-paint, a harmonious, resonant, productive flow of intensities moving together in unison. Paint affords the children influence and a presence in the assemblage. The paint assemblage becomes a world of powerful affects and intensities.
