rivka

Sunday it was my turn to be the lead teacher again for RE, for the first time in a while. (We missed two weeks because of Thanksgiving and then the intergenerational Winterfest worship service.) We're done with the five senses curriculum that the kids have had so much fun with. Instead, I planned a follow-up on a class we did in early fall.

In early October, we walked the kids two blocks to a small local park and had them pick out a "class tree." We examined our tree closely and made rubbings of its leaves and bark. We talked about what made our tree different from other trees in the same park. We collected some leaves and seed pods to take back to our classroom.

Sunday I brought in a big 8x10 picture I took of the kids and their tree. We sat on the floor in a circle and lit the chalice ("This is the church of the open mind, this is the church of the helping hands, this is the church of the loving heart"), and then I brought out the picture and asked them what they could remember about the tree. Then I asked if they thought the tree would be different now. They thought the leaves would have fallen off, and explained to me that this is what happens at the "end of fall." They weren't sure whether there would be any other changes, so we bundled up in our sweaters and went outside to see.

(The weather worked against me. The lesson I had planned would have been perfect for a cold, grey, dim day. Instead, it was blazingly sunny, with temperatures in the 50s. Alas.)

We turned some heads walking up the street, as we always do when we go outside as a class. A middle-aged black guy lounging on a bench watched two of our kids lead us up the street: little girls, one black, one white, unselfconsciously holding hands.

"Martin Luther King would've loved to see that," he told me.
"Yeah," I said, a little surprised. It seemed like such an old-fashioned point of view... but I had to agree that the girls were very cute together.

We found our tree, and sure enough, the leaves had fallen off. We found a few dead ones on the grass underneath and talked about them, and then discussed how naked and empty the branches looked. "Does this mean that our tree is dead?" I asked them in an alarmed voice. No, they assured me, the tree would have leaves again in summer. We collected some dead leaves to take back to our classroom.

There was another difference between the early-fall tree and the winter tree: now it had lights strung all around it. We talked about why people put lights on trees in the winter - because it's a dark time of year ("it gets dark even before dinner"), and bright lights remind us that it will be light and warm again.

Then we found some evergreen bushes to study. We talked about how the bushes stay green all winter, and look awake and alive. One little girl looked back at our class tree then, and told me she thought the tree might be sad because its leaves were gone. I agreed that it did seem kind of sad for a tree to lose its leaves, and said that sometimes people feel sad in the winter when most of the green things have died or lost their leaves... except for the evergreens.

Did the evergreen bush remind them of anything? They weren't sure. Did any of them have a tree in their house right now? They did! Much animated discussion of Christmas trees. Apparently all of our students have HUGE trees that ALMOST TOUCH THE CEILING. Christmas trees look like the evergreen bush, but they're tall instead of wide. We cut a few sprigs from the evergreen bush and went back to church.

As we ate our snack, I put the two sets of leaves in the middle of the table: dry, dead, brown leaves from our class tree, and evergreen twigs lined with deep green needles. "Which kind of tree would you rather have in your house?" Everyone wanted the evergreen twigs. I told them that at Christmastime, when it's usually dark and cold outside and most of the green things have died, people like to bring evergreens into their houses as a reminder that summer will come again to make things grow. We put lights on our Christmas trees to help us feel better about being in such a dark season.

Because it is pretty much illegal to get preschoolers together without doing some sort of craft, I told them that we were going to make something special for our classroom to remind us of growing things and lights. I gave each child a sheet of green construction paper and had them trace their hands and cut them out. As they finished cutting out their hands, they brought them over to where I'd put a big sheet of poster paper on the inside of our classroom door. I arranged the green handshapes, fingers pointing down, into a big triangle shape. Suddenly the fingers became plausible drooping pine boughs, and the whole thing looked very much like an evergreen tree. (See example.) I added a trunk of brown paper and a yellow star for the top. We had a few minutes left when the tree was done, so we made construction-paper ornaments and decorated them with glitter glue (a miraculous invention, and one I hadn't encountered before).

This was a much more sedate class than the last couple of classes I've taught, but the children responded to it well. I'm pleased with how it went. It worked well with the overall 7th Principle theme ("respect for the interdependent web of existence") that all the RE classes are focusing on this year, and also drew in Solstice-related religious themes at a level that the kids were really able to understand and connect to.