Wherein we tell stories and fill holes with water

I have finished 2 weeks of the nature kindergarten classes. I have 5 enrolled students on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with some overlap of the roll. There are 2 who come both days and 6 who come one day each. We meet from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm.

Sukhomlinsky talks in his books of the importance of not overwhelming children with many stories and books. Children love to hear the same story over and over. It is in this way they learn language, rhythm of reading, speech, and vocabulary. After only a few recitations, they know the story and can pick up on unfamiliar words and connotations. After many recitations, they will be able to “read” the book themselves.

I have read the same book each day we have met, The Three Billy Goats Gruff by Paul Galdone. The children have been captivated by this book and listen attentively. There isn’t a specific time I read it. Last Thursday, I read it while they ate lunch. Two days before, I read to them as we sat on the bench by the river. There were three boys there that day: Beckham, Bentley, and Graham. After the story, they made their way over to a small ravine they discovered the week before. It is a dry bed that leads into the river. Another student placed a log over it as a bridge. The boys began playing out the story, with one of them under the log and the others pretending to be the goats as they trip-trapped over the bridge.

I have also introduced a story about a snake that gets stuck on the bridge. Sukhomlinsky would tell stories that incorporated things the children had seen or talked about. The story I started included a turtle who lost a tooth, and the children who were there that day, Evy, Bentley, and Clark, were featured—to their joy—in the story. They were the ones who were tasked with using various means to get the tooth to stay in the turtle’s mouth.

There have already been many things that have happened that I could write about, but I’ll only tell one more thing in today’s post. On Thursday, the children began to play in the sand volleyball court. They dug a hole, and a hole obviously needs to be filled with water. They spent the rest of class time (about 90 minutes) carrying water from a puddle formed by the sprinklers in the fire pit to the hole in the sand using baggies and plastic water bottles. They carried so much water that the puddle was much diminished by the end. The hole was at the far end of the court, so they had to slog through the sand, up an incline over the grass, down a slope to the puddle, and back again. They did this over and over until, at last, the hole was filled, as they had finally hit the clay at the bottom. A very productive morning indeed.

Sisters in the river