Caring Cardinals

Our Morning Meeting discussion was focused on the topic of kindness. We had spent several days last week talking about kind acts and kind words which led to a sensitive discussion about feelings.  We have also been talking about our sense of community and what that may mean to us.  We identified the different communities we as a Cardinal group belong to.   We recognized our Cardinal class community, our Early Childhood community,  the Lower School community, AFS community and Jenkintown community as all groups that we are a part of.  Working, playing and living in our community together we also recognized that we all needed to work together respectfully and listen to each others' ideas and thoughts in order to establish our classroom community.  We talked briefly about solving conflicts and conflict resolution and identified three important questions we should always ask ourselves regarding our actions.
     IS IT KIND?
     IS IT SAFE?
     IS IT GOOD FOR THE COMMUNITY?
All of the children agreed that these were three very important questions we should ask ourselves and agreed that these would help us learn how to live and work to together and grow.  We decided to write a contract and titled it  Cardinals' Caring Contract. Our contract is simple and states very clearly the three concepts stated above.  The children were really excited to participate in such a 'big kid' experience and we asked each children to sign the contract if they agreed with the ideas.  Enthusiastically each children signed their name!

At Choice Time we invited children to come to the tasting table and explore their sense of taste!  Shannon began by sharing a story about how she had noticed so many new and beautiful fruits and vegetables at the supermarket during the weekend.  We thought it might be fun for the children to sample different kinds of apples and that we are all seeing in our supermarkets at this time of year.  The tasting center was opened and the table was set with a green apple, Red Delicious apple, Honey Crisp and Yellow Delicious. When the children visited the center, they were asked to share their observations of what they noticed about the apples. Below are a few of the comments our Cardinals' had:
    "This is green my favorite color. Pears are green. I don't like pears but I like pear cookies.   We have them at home."
    " It tastes bitter. It looks like a blurry red. Can I taste this one. This one will taste like a darker reddish."
    " There are little ones and dark ones and big ones. It tastes like grape."
     " I love green apples. I love red ones. They taste salty a little bit so I'll try a green one."
     " There are different colors. I think these too kinds are really sour kinds. This is the plain kind and this is the cherry kind. It tastes really juicy."



The question was posed,"What can we do with an apple?" The children had many ideas including "make apple pie, applesauce, apple smoothies, make apple cobbler and share it with the class, and maybe we could put legs on the apples and make them into spiders. Maybe we could go to a store that has straight pretzels and make them into legs...."



We had so much fun playing outdoors on the soccer fields.  The weather was glorious and the children absolutely loved the open space to run and play together.  The group is so cohesive and it is so special to see the children developing friendships and connections with each other and our community

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