I love this story because it can become so interactive...and what child doesn't like to be a part of a story? Anyways, for the last two weeks we've been reading this book and the kids have loved it. They practically read it to me the last few days! I highly suggest this for any early childhood classroom
We finished this week with our Halloween Party (yes, I realize we "celebrated" on November 1) due to a scheduling conflict with a fire safety presentation we had to postpone our Halloween celebrations. It ended up we could have had our party on Halloween after all because of Hurricane Sandy - Red Cross was to do our presentation. But oh well... The children still enjoyed the party and I had a refreshing taste of some humanity.
A family came in, two of their children are in my class. They weren't dressed in costume for our party. As I questioned whether or not they had brought their costumes, Mom began to cry. When I pulled her aside to talk to her more in depth, I found she had not been able to purchase costumes for her children due to her financial situation at this time. At the same time I was pulling Mom aside, another parent saw her tears and immediately offered up some costumes she had at home. Mom agreed, and the children were not only dressed for our party, but the other parent GAVE the costumes to the family for Trick-or-Treat this weekend. As I witnessed this all go on, I couldn't help but smile - humanity still does exist! I'm proud to have such caring families with children in my class!
I mentioned Hurricane Sandy earlier in this post... I live in Ohio. That's right, Ohio. And we (we being "Ohio") were unfortunately affected by "Sandy." While most of our Buckeye State suffered only high winds (high meaning gusts up to 60-70 mph) and lots of rain - we're on day 8 here - the Cleveland area was left without power for most of the week. On Monday evening, the winds picked up suddenly and the rain intensified, Lake Erie was described as being "angry" and power outages were becoming more and more popular. By 10:00 p.m., a huge majority of Cuyahoga and Summit County schools were already closing... By 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday - nearly everything, schools and businesses alike, in Cuyahoga County were closed, with the rest of NE Ohio following close behind. Portage County fared well through the storm, with only minor damages, but school officials "played it safe" and schools were closed throughout the county. Our center and one other center in our agency stayed open. I can't speak for the other center, but we only had 12 kids in the center all day... So the day was used to catch up on some much needed planning time - and the kids even helped! :-) Two of my little girls drew pictures of what was happening that day, they even asked for help to write "Hurricane Sandy 2012" on their artwork. While the people in their pictures were smiling (because hey, these two little ones were happy to be at school), it was neat to see the connection they were making as to why their class only had four children in it. We hung their artwork up on our door and they have received many compliments. I think it's pretty safe to say that Ohio experienced its first "Hurricane Day," and quite possibly its last as well. My heart, thoughts, and prayers go out to those who are suffering tremendous destruction from "Sandy" - from Ohio to up and down the East Coast communities have begun the clean-up process that from a few short hours will take months to years to fix.
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