The children began their day with a few calm activities around the classroom. The atmosphere was quietly buzzing with busy Cardinals demonstrating their self assured knowledge of the different areas of the classroom and the comfortably confident children found great places to get to work building, reading, or exploring the art studio.
Soon it was time to take a short walk over to Gwen's Library where the children gathered in front of Gwen to listen to a story about friendship called "Help!". This story, includes the adventures of mouse who learns an important truth about his friendship with his animal friends. The book was well known to the Cardinals but, as always, the children were able to bring original perspectives to the story based on their own experiences. We left Gwen's Library after a fun, stimulating discussion carrying new books to fill our classroom with fresh ideas.
We decided instead of a usual morning meeting we would take that time to surprise Paula with a special card the children had created for her. We had missed Paula who had been out from school and wanted to find a way to show our love and excitement for her return! Each Cardinal had written a personal message inside the card and decorated it with care, and the pride and joy the children took in making Paula smile was wonderful to see.
After a quick group hug, the children dispersed to different activities of interest, set up today around the classroom. There was a fun cutting and gluing art activity exercising our fine motor skills that drew on themes of recycling from yesterday's Earth Day discussions. We used materials that hadn't been used after finishing previous art endeavors to create new, beautiful pieces.
The mathematical missions continued with geo-boards and child-driven shape experimentation which even led to creative applications from beautiful shape designs to self devised geo-board-games that included several different friends in interactive social math play.
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