Gratitude
Hello everyone,
For the short week last week we spent some time focusing on thankfulness, gratitude and giving thanks. Gratitude is such an important practice. We talk about it regularly at school, and I sometimes use a moment of focus on gratitude to switch the mood away from moments of grumpiness and challenge. They say that gratitude is the mother of all virtues, and all good perspective and action flows from there. I definitely recommend taking some time as a family this holiday season to give thanks and talk about thankfulness. It’s a good thing to think and talk about together this week and every week.
On Monday we dealt with some chilly temps and started the day inside. We read Bear Says Thanks and talked about Thanksgiving and what we will do on the holiday. Some new words from this week were “feast” and “gratitude.” We got dressed up and went outside and had our 2nd circle at the pond fire pit. I shared a version of a Potawatomi origin legend that features themes of sacrifice and gratitude as the driving forces in the creation of the world. We acted it out several times so that everyone could get a turn being all of the characters that they wanted to try out. Skywoman and muskrat were the most popular This group is so into re-enacting our stories! We’ve been doing it a lot lately and they are on fire with it.
Then we foraged in the woods for a branch to make our classroom gratitude tree, (loosely based on the tree of life that grows from sacrifice and gratitude in the story.) We decorated "leaves" and wrote down some of the things that we are grateful for on them. We had lots of gratitude for mommies and daddies and sisters and friends. There was also some gratitude for "diggers that are big and very huge!" Some children did lots of writing themselves!
On Tuesday we started the day inside and had a happy birthday circle for Max! We went to the forest and got to do our noticing practice in the silence and sunshine and the thawing temperatures. We found some cool tracks in the snow going down the length of a log. We did a little bit of brainstorming research to try and figure out what it could have been that left them there, and got to think about what might be awake and active in the forest right now with the right shaped feet to match these footprints. We think it was probably a large skunk or possibly a weasel or a fisher. I'm very open to suggestions from anyone with real tracking skills.
At circle time in the forest we read the Passamoquoddy story, Thanks to the Animals, a beautifully illustrated book about a baby that is saved in the winter by all the animals of the forest. The kids love acting this one out! We re-enacted it many times, so that everyone could get a chance to be the baby and all of the different animals that they wanted to be. It was fun! It ends with the family giving thanks to the animals and having a party and a feast to celebrate.
