To share or not to share ?

March 1st, 2018

Dear Parents,

We love March because Spring is almost in the ‘air’. We went for a long ‘nature walk’ around the neighborhood and loved the feeling of cool air and warm sunshine on our face.

Maryna, the ballerina came to dance with us and like every week, we enjoyed our session with her. We did ‘good toes naughty toes’ dance to warm up and then sang and danced to ‘What’s the weather?’. With popular demand, we also practiced our moves for the song ‘Baby Shark’ and then danced to the ‘fruit song’. It is a very funny song with lots of actions and we laughed as we acted to the words of the song like form the banana, peel the banana and so on. Finally, we performed on the ‘circle time song’ and bid good bye to Maryna. We can’t wait for next week’s class because Maryna told us that she will talk about her country then. She asked us, ‘where do you think I am from?’ and gave clues ‘India’, ‘Phillipiness’, ‘Japan’. We said ‘no’. We were pretty sure where she is not from, but unsure about where she is from. Can’t wait for next week to find out!

Our book for today was ‘Rainbow Fish’ by Marcus Pfister. It is a simple story about a beautiful fish who learns to make friends by sharing his most prized possessions. At the end of the story, Pauline asked us if we think that rainbow fish was happy to share. Li said, “yes” and Tai added, “yes happy because have friends”. So and Em said that Rainbow fish will be ‘very sad’. There are two sides of the coin and while some of us believe that ‘sharing is caring’, it’s not always the case. In the story, rainbow fish was born with shiny scales and characterized as vain by other fish who were probably jealous of her. They didn’t want to be his friend. In real world if we are born with beautiful curly hair for example, should we rip it off to share with others because they see us as vain? We must never give up on who we are to please others. Pooja concluded that while it’s good to share some things, there are some things we cannot share. For example, we do not share food in school, we do not cut our hair and give it to someone because they like it. But we can share toys in school. Mo suggested, “we can share bubbles” and Gr commented, “one day I didn’t share, and my sister fought with me”. Tem suggested, “if you want to share, you can say please can I share?”. We wondered what if the person who is playing with a toy doesn’t want to share it at that point in time? should he or she still share? our teachers suggested that if you are still playing with a toy, you can say “I will pass it to you when I am done playing in a few minutes”.

Our discussion took a differed turn as we talked about sharing mum and dad with our siblings. Ant, Gr, Mo, Av and Er shared that they are happy to share their mum and dad with siblings, whereas Em and Tai said that it makes them sad to share mum and dad. Wi then said, “I have no baby no share”. We were a bit cheeky and asked him if he is happy to share his papa with mumma and he laughed and said “no”. Pooja then confessed that her son also doesn’t like to share his mum with his dad and sister and it’s a part of growing up. When she was little, sometimes, she also didn’t like to share her mum and dad, but she is happy now. We all think differently, but in Petals class we all swim together, we are all the same inside. We all love our parents.

Other activities we enjoyed doing today were making hot air balloon, decorating our suitcase, water play with sea animals, playing with trains and painting on our ‘spring artwork’ using pattern paint brushes.

Thank you for a lovely day today!

Love,

Little dancers in Petals Class