Living in harmony with the animals on the earth

The past two weeks our class has easily transitioned to our next unit: "The Animal Kingdom." My Preschool and Kindergarten classes just loves animals. In fact, many young children love animals. This is one of the easiest steps for teaching young children compassion while opening their own hearts to the world all around them. 
The next few blogs will contain the projects that we completed.

To begin the unit I wanted to combine three stories and tell them over and over throughout the next few weeks. I wanted to try some of the techniques from a one of my favorite blogs by: Sally Haughey from: Fairy Dust Teaching. She has written many excellent entries on storytelling.  Specifically here today, the entry on: The power of table top puppets and retelling a story.

I choose the story: The Great Kapock Tree, by Lynne Cherry.  Here is the story read aloud.

The children heard me tell the story with puppets and then we all practiced again and again. For many, this was the first time that they ever had the opportunity to act out or retell a story.  I also want to work with the principals on building strong hands on literacy.

The children acting out different animal parts in the story. These children are listening to sounds on one of our rainforest Cd's and making the sounds of the animals in the story.

 Individually acting out the story

Well, we arent quite yet ready to make a video of our stories, but we have had alot of fun retelling the story in many creative ways.