Be Nice to One Another

"There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up."  --John Holmes

Each year one of the Weekly Readers in the January packet  will be related to Martin Luther King's birthday.  As the years have passed our little paper becomes less about the man and more about his ideas.  I always save this paper for the Friday after the MLK holiday.

This week I used Jan Brett's book The Mitten as the foundation for my curriculum.   The Mitten  is  about a little boy who wants his BaBa to knit his mittens from soft white wool.  She explains it would not be a good idea, because he will lose them in the snow.   Being a loving grandmother she gives in and knits his white mittens. Of course, it doesn't take long before he takes  them off and loses one.   This story is not about the little boy losing his mitten, but about what happens to the mitten.  One by one a parade of animals crawl, push and shove themselves into the  mitten along side the last.  When all is said and done there is a mole, a snowshoe rabbit, a hedgehog, an owl, a fox, a badger, a bear and a mouse inside the mitten.  The mouse, being the last to enter has to sit on the bear's nose.  The bear sneezes and sends all of the animals flying through the air back into the snow, and the mitten flying through the air.

This delightful tale is rich with teaching opportunities.  We practiced sequencing and worked on ordering by size.  We added some wonderful words to our vocabulary.   We even talked about how this author gives us a hint of what is going to happen next  on the next page with "foreshadowing".  Today, ending our unit of  The Mitten, we acted out the story.  At the very end the bear's sneeze blew us back to the table where our  Weekly Readers and crayons were waiting.

Today's Weekly Reader was about getting along with one another.  This to me, is the foundation for everything Martin Luther King taught.  As the children and I talked about Dr. King and his idea that we all needed to work together and be nice to one another, it occurred to me I had  to go back to The Mitten.

I held the book up one more time and ask the children to think about the animals that had pushed into the mitten.  There were eight very different animals.  They were different sizes.  They were different colors.   They smelled differently.  Stuffed inside a small white mitten were prickles, glinty teeth, diggers, big kickers, sharp talons, and "who wouldn't be  afraid of a bear".  They were different, but they worked together to stay warm.  I ask my children to help me to think of ways to help and get along with others.

• you help them read
• you share and care
• you help them
• you help them not to fight
• you hug them
• give them kisses (followed by a collective ...yuck)
• you help them when in trouble
• when they fall pick them up

Wow, what a wonderfully warm way to end a wet and cold school week.