Teamwork

At storytime this week we talked about how things are easier when we all work together.  I started off by handing each child a food item - salt, pepper, carrot, onion, celery, cabbage, and chicken. As I handed them out I talked about what they were and how yummy each was (except for the salt and pepper, where we agreed that a little was good, but too much was not). Then I gave the last child a rock. You know where I'm going with this, of course...

Book 1: Stone Soup by Marcia Brown
A classic story of cooperation, where 3 soldiers trick/encourage suspicious villagers to share what little food they have by making stone soup together. This is a longer book, so I used the props I had given the children to have them come up one at a time and add them to the "soup" we were making.  I used the plastic food that I had at home, so I changed some ingredients to match what I had and skipped others entirely.  At the end, I emphasized that everyone shared and made the soup together.

Book 2: The Gigantic Turnip by Aleksei Tolstoy
A cumulative tale of a man, woman, cow, pigs, cats, hens, etc. who try their hardest to pull a gigantic turnip from the garden. In the end (of course) it only comes out when they all pull together. Again, this was a little bit wordy, but the repetition made it easier for the kids, and I tried to have them join in "...but the turnip would not come out.".  I made up flannelboard images for this story, but in the end I decided not to use them as I thought it would distract from the flow of the story.

Book 3: Sand Castle by Shannon Brenda Yee
This story of a group of kids working together to build a sand castle was going to be my shorter story that I would have read second but the library I requested it from was slow and I didn't receive it until the end of the week. I think it would have worked well enough, so maybe next time I'll request it a bit earlier!

Activity: Making a dinosaur
Before the kids came, I drew a basic Stegosaurus body minus the back plates and the legs on a large piece of paper. I drew 4 legs and enough back plates and tail spines to have enough for each kid. I had them all cut out, then passed them out and had each child decorate their own dinosaur part. We assembled the dinosaur and all decorated the body together. I tried again to emphasize that it was only by working together that we could see the complete picture.

Theme used week of March 8, 2010.

Next week we'll talk about time in honor of the start of daylight savings!