Ask Me About Monday, November 26, 2018

I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends!

We had a very busy day!  I love Mondays with the children because we don't have specials, so that means I can do something special with them!  Today we had our November birthday celebration.  We had an art workshop, and the children got to choose an art medium they would use to create a picture of a tree from one of the four seasons.  They had their choice of collage, watercolors, tempera paint, markers or oil pastels.  They could go to more than one station as long as they had completed their art and it showed their best effort.  It was such a nice time, and surprisingly calm.  We listened to a jazz version of the Four Seasons so maybe the jazz mellowed them out!
We listened to the story If You Plant a Seed, by Kadir Nelson.  This book is so beautiful, and the message is so important.  If you plant the seed of kindness, you will get kindness in return.  The book is about a rabbit and a mouse who plant seeds in a garden and nurture them until they have a very beautiful harvest of vegetables.  As they begin to eat, a group of birds approaches and looks at them.  At this point, the story is told through pictures.  I asked the children what they thought would happen next.  All of the answers at first had to do with the rabbit and mouse sharing with the birds.  This was so refreshing to hear that the children were wanting the rabbit and mouse to share because they had so much, but the illustration shows the rabbit and mouse kind of protecting the food they were eating.  I had to work hard to get them to think that there were other things the rabbit and mouse could have done that weren't so positive.  We talked about that it could even be a bad choice, and finally some children suggested the rabbit and the mouse could not share with the birds.  Ask me to tell you what happens.  We went back and reread the book a second time to talk about how characters' feelings often change throughout a story.  We identified the feelings and found support from the text and illustrations to support our understanding.
In math we reviewed counting strategies for counting scattered groups, arrays and circles, and did some problem solving using more and fewer. 

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe