Jungle Bullies

Today we started talking about Jungle Animals.  Now, we talked a little about these animals last week, because it's hard to talk about what the jungle looks like without mentioning the animals.  But, this week we start to dig a little deeper.

Ms. Michelle was here today.  We started with a quick obstacle course.  First, the kids had to jump down the floor ladder trying not to land on the white rungs of the ladder.  Next, they had to pick a sea creature, walk across a balance beam, then throw the animal into the "ocean" (or on top of the blue bean bag)!  While other friends waited their turn, they explored all kinds of sensory and musical things.  There was a slinky, some stretching balls, a bell, and some baton rain sticks.  The obstacle course was super quick because Ms. Michelle knew we would need some extra time for Finger Fun.  We were making rain sticks.  The kids selected a paper towel roll, then filled it with two scoops of bird seed, then decorated the outside with Dot N Dots, stickers, and markers.  Before we left we had a parade around the room using our new rain sticks to keep the beat!

Our book today was Jungle Bullies by Alex Beard.  In this book, Elephant takes Hippo's spot in the pond, which causes Hippo to pick on Lion, Lion to pick on Leopard, and Leopard to pick on Monkey.  Until Monkey asks him Mom for advice. She tells him to stand up for himself.....and he does telling the Leopard to be nice.  The Leopard apologizes and decides to tell the Lion how he feels.  When the Hippo finally tells the Elephant to be nicer, all the animals end up playing together.  Being nice is more fun because our friends want to play with us!

This story lends itself nicely to some things that we have been talking about A LOT in our classroom.  Being nice to friends, keeping hands to self, no yelling, and saying I'm sorry.  We talked about the parallels between the story....how the animals got what they wanted when they were mean, but they were sad and alone.....and how much fun they all had together when they were nice.  We are hoping that you all will help us keep pounding this home to the kiddos.....we want to have nice friends in our class!

After pictures, which were inside because of the rain, we did art.  For art we made Lions .  We used forks to paint their mane.  You had to be extra careful using the fork to make it look like the lions hair.  It was a surprisingly clean painting day.....but we didn't send the art home because it was much too wet for a trip down the hallway at dismissal.  You'll get to see it tomorrow!