Ben's Bells Kindness Mural

Last week parents and teachers came together to put up a "be kind" mural at the front of our school.  Ben's Bells is an amazing non-profit in Tucson, that promotes the importance of kindness.  

The mission of Ben's Bells is to "inspire, educate, and motivate people  to realize the impact of intentional kindness, and to empower individuals to act according to that awareness, thereby strengthening ourselves, our relationships and our communities."  Learn more about Ben's Bells here:    https://bensbells.org 

Our school, St. Mark's, is what is called a "Kind Campus".  We promote kind actions and words within our school.  At this time there is no real curriculum through Ben's Bells at the preschool level.  So how does our school teach young children at this age kindness?   We believe that it is necessary at this age to give children the vocabulary they need to express themselves.  We also believe in the importance of promoting a child's social-emotion well-being.

Basically, we promote kindness at this young age through literacy, through modeling positive words and actions, and by constantly positively reinforcing kind behavior.  As Jeanette Maré states, kindness is a learned behavior.  It's not taught in one day.  By starting early the power of kindness has the ability to become something wonderful and affect and motivated everyone around us.

Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me

This craft is based upon the book Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me by Eric Carle.  We began by reading the book, a lot!  We re-read at least once every day that we did this craft.  It was a great conversation starter about waning and waxing moons, and we even went into solar systems when one child asked me if the moon was bigger than the sun.  We also touched on collage a little and how Eric Carle's pictures are all done using collage and paper.  In this craft we only used collage for the moons, which the kids did collaboratively.

We started by painting the sheet of paper.  I gave them both green sparkly paint and blue sparkly paint and the just combined them and smeared them around as much as they wanted.  I really like how the brush stokes added some twirls and lines!

We then collaged a piece of paper with white tissue paper and a grey paper.  Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of that process.  When it was dry I cut out the circles.  The children then glued down the moon, stars, and ladder, which was small sized Popsicle sticks.

I took pictures of the children from a ladder and added them on.

Cascarones

Making cascarones with children.  Cascarones are hallowed out eggs filled with confetti.  They are often used in celebrations to hit people on the head with, having confetti fall on them.