Hey there, Elm Tree Families! What a great first day! We couldn't have asked for better weather, and the kids had tons of fun running around, reading, and writing!
Once everyone arrived, we got in a circle to play a few name games before asking the kiddos for some ideas about how we can keep our bodies safe at the park. They came up with great ideas like watching out for poisonous plants and not picking up trash. They also suggested that we be kind to one another. After that, we explored our little wooded area as a group and set the boundaries. Pretty soon, everyone was ready to play hide-and-seek! The Elm Tree Crew seems to enjoy hide-and-seek the most when they get to count and hide in groups. The more the merrier!
Next we ate our snacks and tried our hand at a fave game from last year, "When Suddenly." Sitting in a circle, we each add to a story, signaling the next person's turn with the phrase, "when suddenly...." At first we tried to use a newfangled transcription app, and it gave us pretty funny results, but missed some of the best parts of our story, so we switched back to our tried-and-true method of recording and transcribing. See the two stories below!
Story One:
What time does it go and he wanted to make his lips really really read to tell your mom he could miss school then suddenly came by eating some grass and his…
Story Two:
Once upon a time, there was a goat who wanted to make his lips green, so the doctors will think he has a disease and he can miss school and go to the doctors, and then, his mom said to the doctor, he doesn't have a disease, he was just eating green grass, and then he went to school and he got in trouble by his lips being green, and then they had recess, and he tipped over and knocked someone's lunch box down, when suddenly...
The person who owned the lunch box, which was a cow, challenged the goat for a race, and then they raced all around the recess for the whole time, and then it was time to go back in, but they were still racing and they got in trouble, when suddenly...
A dragon came, when suddenly...
The fearsome dragon took all of the cows away except for that goat because the goat had strong feet and hands, so the goat kicked the dragon in its belly and the dragon fell over, and he knocked down a sword that flew in the air and then cut the dragon's belly open, when suddenly...
They realized, "Oh no! I was gonna use that dragon's breath to toast marshmallows! Now, I need to find a new way to make fire!" When suddenly...
Another person came and it was a human and it started to torture the cows and then another human came and taught him how to make fire, but then the marshmallows were all black and tasted like charcoal, and then he had to get new marshmallows, and he didn't have any more money, when suddenly...
The story ended!
After finishing snack, we walked to the grass on the other side of the tunnels. Since we wrote "wish poems" last summer, we were curious to see how the wishes of the Elm Tree Kids have changed and grown! After reading a few example poems and discussing what we liked about them, the young poets got to work writing their own wishes. Then we went back into the tunnel and wrote some of our wishes on the floor!
Once our hands were nice and chalky, we hiked over to the Natural Playground. After entering the play area, the kids immediately entered into a pretend world of castles in the sky and magical creatures. We really do believe that nature invigorates the imagination, and climbing on all those beautiful tree trunks really got theirs going!
We tuckered ourselves out with all that dramatic play, so after the Natural Playground we walked to a nearby tree for shade, lunch, and rest time. While eating, we started to talk about all the things our food looked like. We decided all the cool comparisons we were making sounded like a poem, so we wrote it down!
Different Shapes of Different Things
The celery looks like it has hair
The tomato looks like a tiny bun
The mango looks like a gold fish
The sandwich looks like a sailboat
The bowtie looks like a butterfly
The strawberry looks like a tulip
The strawberry looks like it flies up in the air
The pepper looks like a sprinkler
The pepper looks like a wave
The rice looks like little fishies
The rice looks like a ton of sand dollars
The rice looks like a beachAfter eating, we read the first two chapters of My Father's Dragon. Some kids decided to draw while listening, others decided to just relax, and all the kids gave the book a thumbs up! We're excited to see what happens in the book tomorrow. Next we looked at book called What Does Peace Feel Like. After reading it, we felt so inspired that we wrote our own version! In writing this poem, we discussed using comparison as a means to describe the world around us. The Elm Tree Crew were all pros at this comparison stuff by now, and jumped right in.
Peace Poem
Peace looks like the people who are looking down on you and all around you like air
Peace looks like turquoise
Peace looks like love, when you go to sleep you can see it
Peace looks like angels like when my grandpa showed up one morning
Peace smells like man n cheese
Peace looks like all of the things from “my favorite things,” that song from The Sound of Music
Peace lives somewhere high
Peace lives where your loved ones are and where heaven is
Peace sounds like nothing
Peace sounds like raindrops when they fall in a lake
Peace sounds like "uuum"
Peace sounds like whispers from loved ones 
We also discussed how this book is kind of like an ode to peace. The kids weren't familiar with the word "ode," so we described it to them as a poem you write to something you really, really love, and how, when writing an ode, it's important to describe the object of your affection in a way that your readers will understand how much you love it. Hector brought up Ode to Joy and even hummed it for us! For another ode example, we read and discussed the poem "Ode to my Socks" by Pablo Neruda. In this poem, the speaker describes a pair of wool socks, comparing them to everything from rabbits to the twilight to fire! We decided to write odes to things we love in Brooklyn and the park. See the work below!
After all this writing, we realized that we didn't have time for sprinkler fun. Instead we played two games before heading back to the Natural Playground for more dramatic-and-sand-play. The first game we played is called, "Come with me my friends." In this game, the person who is "it" moves a distance from the group before calling out, "Come with me, my friends, if you like...." Then they call out something they like, like chocolate or dinosaurs. All the kids who also like that thing run across the grass to meet the caller. Then the caller moves to a new location and shouts out the phrase again but with a new like. The kids loved it! They all wanted a turn to be "it."
When we got back to the Natural Playground, the kids jumped right back into their games from earlier. They even made a couple new friends!
<3,
Sally & Molly
No comments:
Post a Comment