Week of Jan. 14th

Collecting "Good Stuff"

Old sunglasses, bottle caps, and broken jewelry look like junk to some, but to JK these items are "Good Stuff"! Thank you for your help and resourcefulness in collecting unwanted items to use in our Snowfriend building project.  There must be lots of clean and organized "junk drawers" around town.  But before we could build, we shared our items during a great math activity.  We each had two circles, and we placed one of our items in the circle.  We had to name an attribute of the item and then sort the pile by that attribute.  The children had the most fun turning the activity into a guessing game and trying to stump their friends (and teacher) with their clever sorting!  Can you tell how the items were sorted when you look at the photos in the album?

Building a Snowfriend

To start our Snowfriend building project, we made a "blueprint" of the type of Snowfriend we wanted to create - girl, boy, spy, cat...many possibilities were designed.  Next came painting the snowballs with the biggest on the bottom - not as easy as it looks to size the balls and fill up the cardboard piece!  "Is it my turn yet?" was echoed over and over as the children anxiously awaited their turn to put together their Snowfriend.  It was interesting to watch the process as they put things on, changed their mind, put things back, and even shared their precious collections.  Some things were just too special to glue down for good!  Once everyone had a turn, we wrote a story about our Snowfriend!  We can't wait to share our creations with you at the LS Show and Share night coming up at the end of the month!

This is Our House - a story about including and excluding others!

What can a great big box teach us about fairness, inclusion, and kindess?  In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we took some time on Friday to talk in an age-appropriate way about these important ideals.  First I showed the children a picture of Dr. King and talked about the holiday on Monday in his honor.  I did not talk about his life, but I shared that he was an important leader who believed in fairness.  We then read a story about a little boy named George who was playing on the playground in a big box decorated like a house.  As other children came up to join him, he told them that they couldn't play because the box wasn't for people with... "red hair, glasses, twins, or people who liked to dig tunnels!"  Soon the tables were turned and George was excluded from the house.  In the end, the children decided that the box was indeed for "everyone!"  It was meaningful to act out the parts and get a gentle reminder of how it feels to be included or excluded.  Hopefully, this was a good introduction to the important work of Dr. King and to the work we need to do each day to keep his ideals alive!

Enjoy the long weekend,

Mrs. Jeffers