In continuing to explore perspective, the children have been reading Doreen Cronin’s books “Diary of a Worm” and “Diary of a Spider”. The books present an insect perspective in an enlightening and humorous way, for example, “vacuum drills” at spider school instead of fire drills. The class has been full of laughter, and more importantly, the children are using unique skills to categorize information from literature, such as creating Venn diagrams and t-charts to compare perspectives of insects and people. Sorting and classifying information is an expectation of the curriculum, as well as examining various points of view in a plethora of texts.
We have also begun a short novel study on the book “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes”. The children are learning about differences in the perspectives of Japanese children and themselves, noting “They eat rice for breakfast!” They are also seeing what war perspective was for Japanese survivors after World War II. We will continue with various activities relating to the story, and will be exploring in symmetry in mathematics by trying some origami in the coming days.
