Hi everyone! Welcome to our second blog of the month. The whole school gathered together to celebrate the births of all the students born in November. Shooting Star’s Ms. Fronie was in charge this month and she did a fun ‘drink making’ presentation for the audience. She made strawberry juice for Santa Claus, melon juice for snowman and banana juice for the reindeer.
This week we moved on to the second line of inquiry of our discovery of how stories help us understand ourselves and others. The students listened to the “The color monster” story . They then tried to define the emotions portrayed by the color monster in the story and explain why they thought the color monster felt that way.
To discover how feelings and ideas are expressed through storytelling, we did a ‘story building’ activity as a class.
There were 5 color coded cubes. The colors pointed out whether something happened in the beginning, the middle or the end of the story. Pink represented the beginning, black the middle and white the end. The first person who rolled the cube had to narrate what was happening in the picture to get the ball rolling. The second, third and fourth people would say what happened in the middle and the fifth person would create an ending to the story. We did three rounds of this and below are the pictures of the stories we created together and their respective descriptions. The sequence of events begins from the bottom of the tower and ends at the top.
Story number 1:”Once upon a time, there was a girl named Goldilocks .She saw a house while she was taking a walk. She wanted to get inside that house, but there was a tiger drinking soup in the kitchen. While the tiger was eating, the mom of that house and her child had gone to buy groceries for that tiger. On the other side of town, another girl was having fun, feeding a monkey a banana from the window of a bus. Her grandma was waiting for her to come back home. She made her gingerbread so that she could eat something when she got back.THE END!”
Story number 2:”A family and their dog were going somewhere. They were visiting their grandmother. On their way there, they saw a girl feeding a monkey a banana. While the girl was feeding the monkey, she started thinking of her plans to go shopping with her mom. When the family finally got to where they were going ,they decided to go eat at a restaurant. THE END!”
Story number 3: “A girl was leaving for school so she waved goodbye to her mom . After she left, a tiger knocked on the door. The girl’s sister let the tiger into the house. They started eating lunch together . The tiger was still hungry so he went to the kitchen to look for more food. He started eating from the pot. When the girl got back home from school all the food was finished so she went out to eat with her family.THE END!”
It was a fun way to use their imagination and a good opportunity for them to review one of the elements of stories (PLOT) that they learned about a few weeks ago.
For this week’s show and tell we enjoyed presentations of stuffed animals, an autumn themed tree and a tiny Christmas tree made of interesting materials. It seems that when someone brings something original that they made, , they have more to say and the audience ask questions with depth. Please remind your kids that they are welcome to bring things they make at home for show and tell!
We entered a Christmas decoration competition. A couple of schools around Nagano will be competing for the title of ‘best decorated tree’.This is the first time any graduating class of ISN has ever done anything like this. They are all excited and are already hard at work, making their original ornaments for the tree! We all look forwrad to seeing how the final product turns out.
~The week ahead~
We will continue to explore how feelings and ideas are expressed through storytelling. We look forward to seeing how the students can grow by reflecting on all the knowledge they have gained so far and to see how they will incorporate feelings and expressions into their Christmas play roles.
Thank you for reading our blog. Have a great weekend!
