Sweet Porridge Circle, Week 2

Some notes from our second week of porridge fun!

We continued with our Songs, Verses & Movement for classroom routines.

Circle Time

#1 - "Good Morning, Dear Earth" verse

#2 - "Morning Verse"
from A Child's Seasonal Treasury, page 13

#3 - "We Stretch Right Up to the Star of Our Birth" verse
from The Breathing Circle, page 56

#4 - "We Stretch Like Cats, We Stretch Like Tigers" verse
from The Breathing Circle, page 57

#5 - "Hippo Song" verse
from The Breathing Circle, page 71

#6 - "The Door's Shut Tight!" verse
from The Breathing Circle, page 73

#7 - "Pull on My Rain Boots!" verse
from The Breathing Circle, page 88

#8 - "The Elephant" verse
from A Child's Seasonal Treasury, page 17

#9 - "I'm a Tall, Tall Tree" song

#10 - "Looking through the Garden Gate" verse
from The Breathing Circle, page 94

#11 - "Five Little Peas" finger play
from The Breathing Circle, page 82

#12 - "Two Fat Gentlemen" finger play
from The Breathing Circle, page 82

Monday

• "Sweet Porridge" Movement Journey, pages 94-97
  from Movement Journeys and Circle Adventures: Therapeutic Support for Early Childhood, Volume 2 by Nancy Blanning and Laurie Clark
• read The Magic Cooking Pot: A Folktale of India retold by Faith Towle
  
• Old-Fashioned Rice Pudding

After starting out the morning with quiet book reading inside elaborate silk-covered play structures, the children suddenly jumped up and were ready to move! So of course we did the "Sweet Porridge" movement journey (which is a combination of a Circle Time, a Story, and an indoor Obstacle Course) and then we had our full circle time plus a new story. The children really enjoyed the folktale from India, which was a twist on the magic porridge pot. I really enjoyed its beautiful batik illustrations.

Today's story featured rice and so we made a rice pudding. It was delicious!

Tuesday

• Coconut Black Rice Breakfast Pudding
• look at plant experiments

Another relaxing morning of building with blocks, weaving potholders, and hanging out. Looking at the results of our plant growing experiments on the Nature table (the sweet potato and celery are growing beautifully; the avocado and bok choy didn't make it)... playing Step to It... paging through the beautiful coffee table book Wildlife of North America: Spectacular Fauna Seen Through the Lenses of Great Nature Photographers... standing on a line of stools carefully arranged along the window and watching Becca mow.

It has been so nice to see this cluster of four little boys come together into a close knit group. It is interesting to watch the busy sparking of ideas in creative play, and it's also fun to see them slow down and relax together, simply enjoying the camraderie of familiar friends and the steadiness of regular routines. They had a grand time gathering all of those stools and standing at the window and watching Becca and just chatting away! Of course, people had to navigate plenty of social aspects still, including placing shorter people on taller stools, trading stools, sharing stools, changing their mind and leaving, changing their mind and coming back to the group...

I wanted us to have the experience of another kind of rice, so we made a black rice pudding which was cooked with coconut milk and half a vanilla bean and topped with a variety of tropical fruits (kiwi, mango, pineapple, passion fruit, yellow and red papaya, and banana).

Thursday

• "Sweet Porridge" Movement Journey, pages 94-97
  from Movement Journeys and Circle Adventures: Therapeutic Support for Early Childhood, Volume 2 by Nancy Blanning and Laurie Clark
• clay pinch pots and Mother's Day cards
• Breakfast Quinoa with Chai-Spiced Almond Milk

We enjoyed doing our "Sweet Porridge" Movement Journey outside today in a lovely light drizzle. You definitely get more a feeling of the porridge filling the house and rolling down the streets of town if you do it outside and walk all around your yard (as opposed to just walking around inside your house).

Other projects for the morning included building wooden marble mazes, working with clay, experimenting with the different textures you get when you press seashells into your wet clay, making Fruit Salad, and enjoying our daily porridge tasting. Today was a quinoa dish which was topped with pecans and coconut. Yum! For our final porridge excursion on Monday we will head to Africa with an ancient Ethiopian grain called teff.

Here was our list of group contributions for Fruit Salad this week:

banana
apple
blueberries
grapes
mango
pear
strawberries
blackberries

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