The summer round of the Children's English Hour started off with an exploration into unusual fruit. But first we sang some of our favorite songs, including the Energy song to get us warmed up and Bells on Your Toes. Then we read Richard Scarry's 1963 charmer I am a Bunny.
Everyone knows strawberries are red. And sometimes a little bit green or yellow, but just a little bit, and not all the time. But are strawberries blue? "No!" insisted the kids. Perplexed, I told them I had seen a blue strawberry, and a purple one, and an orange one, for that matter. "No! Strawberries are red!" echoed around the room. So I needed to show the kids a blue strawberry so that they would believe me.
First, the children were presented with bowls of a brightly colored granular material. "What is it?" I asked. The kids shrugged. "Taste it!" I suggested. Timid fingers dipped into the colorful stiff, then cautiously touched the tips of tongues. Eyebrows raised and smiles spread. "What is it? Is is sugar?" "Yes!" Then I uncovered a bowl of perfectly normal red strawberries (with a little bit of yellow and a little bit of green on them, of course). I took a nice big juicy one and dipped it into the blue sugar. Violá: a blue strawberry! Each child was encouraged to try all the different colors to see if the strawberries tasted the same when they changed colors. Yummy, juicy fun!
Then we practiced counting to twenty loudly and quietly, marching in a circle and rapping and clanging little instruments. We finished up with magic bubbles, our goodbye song and an orange bunny stamp.
Musical accompaniment for our creative project: Claude Bolling's incomparable Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano
Todays vocabulary: bunny, butterfly, bird, frog, red, blue, yellow, orange, green, purple, strawberry, sugar, taste, sweet
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