Pearl has been reading the book, The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint Exupey.
This is a beautiful story about a little boy prince who lives on a planet by himself with just a few volcanoes and a rose who is his friend. He travels the univers visiting planets and meeting their inhabitants. It is a philisophical reflection on people and their motivations, written from an uncorrupted perspective. Pearl chose this book to be her book to read to herself, but she also read it to us and we read it to her as a bedtime story.
This book prompted great lesson ideas. She firstly pointed out that the book doesn't have chapter headings, but rather symbols. She was refering to roman numerals. For her maths that day, she learned roman numerals. She was able to recognize patterns and write numbers up to 100. Since then she has been able to read the chapter numbers in the book.
After, I asked her pretend like she lived on one of the planets that the little prince visited. At first she was very excited about this activity. But when it came to doing the work, it took a lot of persuading. To get her going I suggested she drew a picture of her planet. This helped get the ideas flowing.
Pearl is a very talented writer and can write pages and pages when she feels like it. But for this activity, she did no feel like it, and that is ok. What I did notice, was that she went through and edited her work the next day without me prompting her to. Next steps will be to teacher her about first, second, and third person writing and help her establish consistency in that area.
Using air dry clay, the kids then sculpted their own little planets. They loved this activity. If I were to this over again, I would have started with drawing, then sculpting, and then writing. The art process would have given her more time to formulate her descriptions for her writing. I may intorduce her to using mind maps, or brainstorms to also help her with formulating her ideas.
