Weekly Activities

This week, the children worked on a project together. The project was to create dioramas that depicted scenarios from the book "One of Each" by Mary Ann Hoberman.  In this story, Oliver Tolliver lives alone and is quite content having only one of each until he invites a friend over. His friend, Peggoty Small doesn't agree with his one of each home. Oliver comes to realize that he enjoys the company of friends and goes to find a pair for everything in his house. Even after having two of everything, his greatest joy was sharing a plate of food with his friends. Painting the dioramas The "one of each" and "two of each" cupboards Proud of his work Making puppets This group effort had the children compromise and problem solve as they made the decisions as to who did what job and what scenes they would create. Once the dioramas were complete, the children made puppets so they could re-enact the story with each other. The finished proje...

Mr. Gumpy's Outing by John Burningham Making origami boats Mr. Gumpy goes for a boat ride and along the way a number of animals ask if they can join him. He allows them but he has rules to his generosity. If the rabbit joins, he cannot hop.  If the cat comes aboard, he cannot chase the rabbit and on it goes. Mr. Gumpy has a condition for each animal.  The trip goes smoothly until one at a time each animal breaks his/her rule and they all capsize.  Still being generous, Mr. Gumpy asks the animals back to his house to share a meal.     I wondered aloud if Mr. Gumpy was too generous and that is why they fell into the water. Sofia said, "No, you can't be too generous because that is what it is all about." William thought that maybe only 4 animal should be on the boat then they wouldn't tip. Tyreese agreed that not all of the animals should go at once. Coming onto the boat Testing the boats Sofia's comment had us thinking: if Mr. Gumpy...

All of the children agree that sharing is being generous so we explored this idea further today. We read  Jan Brett's story of the Ukrainian folktale   The Mitten . Nikolai asks his Grandma to knit him a mitten. When Nikolai is out in the snow, he drops his mitten.  A mole finds the mitten and crawls inside. The story goes on with other animals crawling into the mitten to stay warm. In the end, the bear sneezes sending the mitten into the air and Nikolai catches it. The mole was the first to crawl into the mitten.  The children thought he was generous to let the next animal crawl in.  As the mitten became crowded Bela noticed how all of the animals still let in others to share the space.  This led to us talking about sharing spaces at Creative Minds. We used this story to practice our math skills keeping track of the number and order of the animals as they crawled into the mitten. Using their fine motor skills, each child sewed a mitten. ...