Friday, November 22, 2013

So Many Feelings Here

Our fabulous school counselor has been doing regular lessons with my kiddos about emotions. She's read picture books and they've talked about the feelings of the characters. One of our goals with this (and we have many) is to help students make connections to books through emotions. Often first graders make connections by such things as, "I have a brother just like the boy in the book!" or "I like to play with blocks just like the girl in the book!" Not meaningful connections.
After a few lessons I asked students to pick one or two of their books and mark pages where they can tell how a character is feeling. They marked with post-it notes and wrote the emotion on it. Then we talked about how they knew - used the pictures, what they read. When they shared, mostly they talked about characters who felt happy or sad or mad. A few got brave and talked about excited or frustrated characters. It was a great start.
Later I came across a stray post-it lying on the floor. Clearly it came off a copy of Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late! by Mo Willems, a class favorite. 
The post-it said, "pigeon is untired" Yes, yes he is. 

No comments: