It's hard to believe that we are already in March and that the First Day of Spring (March 20th) will be upon us soon! The sun has been shining more and we have even started to see the first flowers beginning to bloom. How lucky we are to be on the beautiful West Coast!
This is a short month at school, as we have our Spring Break, along with Easter long weekend. We hope that everyone enjoys the time off, whether your family will be travelling or having a "Staycation"!
Important Dates:
Spring Break: Monday, March 14th- Friday, March 25th.
Easter Monday: Monday, March 28th NO classes in session
School reopens: Tuesday, March 29th.
As we celebrated Pink Shirt Day this past week, our discussions in class turned to the theme of Kindness! You may hear your child talking about their "bucket" and how full or empty it is feeling. We have used the book How Full is Your Bucket to illustrate to the children how kind or unkind words have an affect on every one.
Here is a sample of some the books we have shared in class surrounding this topic.
For an online reading of this book, click on the link below:
Chrysanthemum loves her name! Until she is teased about it by others. Each time she is teased, her self esteem drops a little lower.
To illustrate this, we started the story with a crisp, clean, smooth paper with Chrysanthemum's picture.
Each time the children in the story said something unkind, we crumpled the picture to show how it made her feel.
Everytime some one said something kind in the story, we smoothed the picture out. The children observed that even when her pictured was smoothed out, it still had wrinkles and wasn't perfect any more.
We discussed how it is hard to fix the damage unkind words do.
Lily Jean moves into the neighbourhood and excludes one of her new neighbours from playing. During the reading of this book, we had a large paper heart that we crumpled every time something unkind was said. At the end of the story, each student thought of something kind to say to smooth the paper heart out. As they said it, they came up to put a band aid on the heart to help "heal" it.
Molly Lou Melon is shorter than average, has larger teeth her friends, and her voice sounds odd....but Molly Lou's grandmother finds the silver lining to all of those attributes and teaches her to love herself.
When Molly Lou moves and encounters a school yard bully, his unkind words
can't empty her bucket because it is so full.
We also discussed after the book why the bully was being so unfriendly. The students were quick to aptly point out that it was because HIS bucket was empty.
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