Arkansas Children’s Week 2012
This week is Arkansas Children’s Week. The Theme is ” Meet me Under the Story telling Tree .” I love children’s stories and we will have a great time this week celebrating some of our favorites.
Our main story today was ” Good Night Moon.”
Goodnight Moon is classic children’s literature in North America. The text is a rhyming poem, describing a bunny’s bedtime ritual of saying “goodnight” to various objects in the bunny’s bedroom: the red balloon, the bunny’s dollhouse, the kittens, etc.
One aspect of this book is the wealth of detail in the illustrations. Although the entire story takes place in a single room, the careful reader or child will notice numerous details from page to page, including:
- the hands on the two clocks progress from 7 PM to 8:10 PM.
- the young mouse and kittens wander around the room. The mouse is present in all pages showing the room.
- the red balloon hanging over the bed disappears in several of the color plates, then reappears at the end.
- the room lighting grows progressively darker.
- the moon rises in the left-hand window.
- the socks disappear from the drying rack.
- the open book in the bookshelf is The Runaway Bunny.
- the book on the nightstand is Goodnight Moon.
- in the painting of the cow jumping over the moon, the mailbox in the right-hand side of the painting occasionally disappears.
- in the painting of the three bears, the painting hanging in the bears’ room is a painting of a cow jumping over the moon.
- the painting of the fly-fishing bunny, which appears only in two color plates, appears to be black and white (or otherwise devoid of color). It is very similar to a picture in the book “The Runaway Bunny“.
- the number of books in the bookshelf changes.
- the pendulum of the bedside clock disappears in the final room scene
- the stripes on the bunny’s shirt change
- in the last page the word bunny is gone off the brush
- on the last page the mouse has eaten the mush
Some of the things we did today that go along with the book is we talked about all the things in our room that we could say good night to. Some answers I got were ” my lego man” and ” my brother. ”
We also talked about the green walls in the book and we graphed what color we would like our bedroom walls to be.
We also drew our house or our room.
I did work on some assessments this morning randomly as kids flowed in and out of the room playing. I am hoping to have the assessments ready by parent teacher conferences next week.
I also painted a sign so you will know where to go when you get to the park tonight !
At 10 am we gathered together and went to the park to play. Mia’s grandmother , Joni, met us there with Subway kids meals for all the kids and box lunches for the parents that came to help. They kids meals were wonderful, met our food requirements , down to the chocolate milk and the parent boxes were equally as yummy. Thanks Joni and Subway for doing this for us !
Before the meals arrived we ” sat under a tree” and listened to a story
and then we used side walk chalk to draw pictures .
On Mondays the kids are always exhausted from running all weekend so by the time we got back to the house ( 12:40 ) they were really tired and getting a wee little cranky. Thankfully , the are resting up now for our big storytelling night in the park and to their surprise when they wake up they will each have little red balloons just like on the story ” Good Night Moon.”
Her are a few of the pictures I took while we played at the park . I will load the rest on FB tonight after the Story Telling event.
