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7 Picture Books By and About Native Americans

11/21/2021

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​The NYC region is the ancestral home of the Canarsie, Lanape, and Wappinger peoples. Today and every day, it is important to learn about and honor Native history and celebrate Native heroes - past and present - with your kids.
 
Here are seven beautiful children’s books written by and about Indigenous people. Many of these books are illustrated by Indigenous artists as well. Enjoy!

  1. When We Are Kind by Monique Gray Smith
    ​A book about the many ways to be kind – and how it makes us feel.
  2. We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga by Traci Sorell
    This book highlights a full Cherokee year of celebrations and traditions.
  3. Thanku: Poems of Gratitude, illustrated by Marlena Myles, edited by Miranda Paul
    A book of poems about gratitude, including illustrations and many poem by Indigenous peoples.
  4. You Hold Me Up by Monique Gray Smith
    This picture book explores all the ways that we can show love and respect for one another.
  5. Hungry Johnny by Cheryl Minnema, illustrated by Wesley Ballinger
    A story about a hungry child and Ojibwe community and celebration.
  6. Thanks to the Animals by Allen Sockabasin
    A young boy gets lost as his family travels to their winter home, and kind animals come to keep him safe and warm.
  7. Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message by Chief Jake Swamp, illustrated by Erwin Printup, Jr.
    A children’s version of the Thanksgiving address, written by a contemporary Mohawk chief.
  8. And a bonus: this article (for caregivers) is an honest account of the myths of the first Thanksgiving, as told by a member of the Wampanoag tribe.

​Special thanks to Debbie Reese's comprehensive blog about American Indian portrayal in children's books, which is an excellent resource. Debbie is Nambé Pueblo.

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Teaching Emotional Intelligence to Children Part 2: Facing Our Feelings - with crafts!

11/2/2017

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No, we’re not knitting away our sadness or sculpting our fears - at least not today. We are feeling some more feelings, assisted by one of our favorite craft projects: the emotions face!
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LOVE these things! Use them a million ways:
  • Draw attention to all the different parts of our bodies (particularly faces) that we use to show emotion - whether we realize it or not.
  • Make an expressive face showing an emotion, and ask the kids try to copy it with their emotion faces.
  • Adjust your emotion face to show a feeling and ask the kids to guess what emotion the face is showing.
  • Ask the kids to copy each other's expressive faces on their emotion faces. 
  • Give kids small mirrors and ask them to copy their own expressive faces.
  • Ask the children to show feelings on their emotions face, then draw those faces on a separate piece of paper and label them with the appropriate emotion.
  • Use during story time - "who can show me on the emotion face how you think the bunny is feeling?"
  • Once the children are used to them, incorporate them into self-regulation and problem-solving
    • "Can you show me on the emotions face how you are feeling/how you think your friend feels/how you would feel if... "
    • or "I notice that your face looks like the angry face [display on emotions face]. Did I read your face correctly; is that how you are feeling? How can we help you feel like this face [display happy emotions face]?"​

And many more. But before you can use them, we need to make them....

Get Ready to Craft!

Assemble:
  • Face and Feature Template (download below)
  • Scissors
  • Hole punch
  • Crayons/markers for decorating face
  • Brass fasteners
  • Base material: cardboard, cardstock, paper plates, or other. See below.
If you plan to make one face durable enough for the whole class to play with, go with cardboard - cut out cardboard to glue the paper face and features onto. 
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If you're making several faces, I say skip the cardboard in favor of cheap paper plates. We love to have the kids each make their own Emotions Face, so our execution doesn’t need to be highly
durable so much as highly do-able in repetition. 

Ok.... it's also because 
more pliable materials reduce scissor fatigue - or whatever it’s called when you’ve been cutting out so many things, or cutting such hard-to-cut things, that the shape of the scissor handle becomes permanently imprinted around the base of your thumb….
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Instead, I prefer a material that can be bent and cut, and have holes punched in it, with relative ease.

Cardboard does not meet this standard for me, so
 grab some cheap plain paper plates from your local pizzeria (or order them). Bonus: they are already face shaped, which saves time cutting out a lot of blank face circles!


Our hole punchers can’t reach more than an inch or two beyond the border of the face. So unless you have a very fancy long-necked hole punching device, you’ll need to fold the face in order to punch holes in it to attach the features.

Full credit to Mr. Printables for creating the template pictured above! Downloadable right here:
emotions face blank template.pdf
File Size: 68 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Make A Face!
Paper Plate Edition...
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We often skip the tears/cheeks as I feel they can be more hassle than useful (plenty of ways to show sad without actual crying), but some people like them. If you want to use the cheeks/tears, glue them back-to-back. Then thread a needle with thread or skinny yarn through the top of the cheek/tear pair.
  • You can put make a small hole in the face with the needle and put both ends of the thread through that hole on the face; tape the thread ends very securely to the back of the face. I think my fingers are too big to do this but you may have better luck.
  • Or you can tie off thread ends into a loop, punch holes for brass fasteners above the cheek area, then place the thread loop over fastener; loose enough to be able to flip the cheeks into tears, but small enough that the cheek won’t droop down to the chin when you attach it.
(If you discover a simpler way to do this, I’d love to hear about it.)  
Alternative: If you’re willing to eventually lose/squash some of the facial features when they are not attached, to sacrifice a little precision in the manipulating of the features, and to invite Mr Potato Head style feature-swapping, you could ditch all the hole punching and fasteners and just use velcro dots to attach all the features.

All Done!
Bring a Bitty City Players Social-Emotional Learning workshop to your school! Contact us here

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Teaching Emotional Intelligence to Children:   Part 1

10/25/2017

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Today we’re feeling our feelings, kiddos! Social-emotional learning (SEL) is one of the most important parts of early childhood education, in the classroom and at home.  
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If we formally incorporate SEL into lessons for toddlers, preschoolers, kindergarteners, and in early elementary, we equip children with the resources to handle social-emotional challenges - and save them lots of frustration (and potentially lots of money in therapy) later on in life.

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Classic Tech in the Modern Classroom

10/4/2017

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An Ode to the Old School, and the enduring awesomeness of the Clunky Overhead Projector

An email appeared in my inbox on Monday advertising “tablets and computers designed for children as young as 2 years old!”  🙄🤦‍♀️
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I’m sure the kids will love them. People will buy them. They’ll imagine toddlers getting a jump start on careers as budding software engineers and brilliant coders because they were exposed to technology at a young age - and it’s labeled age appropriate, and made by experts, so what could be wrong?
​

Our job as educators, formal or informal, is to help equip children to function successfully in the world around them. There’s no denying that technology is an important part of that world. I love technology and it has a place in our lives in our children's lives. 
BUT (you knew there was a “but” coming)... the neurological hard-wiring of the human brain has not evolved at the same rate as our technology.  Its place in a classroom with children under 10 is, in my opinion, questionable. Technology is far more prevalent and sophisticated than it was 50 or 100 years ago, but the cognitive learning process of the 2017 kid remains essentially the same as 1967 kid or the 1917 kid.
So today, we look backwards to go forwards! We bring some 1917 and 1967 technology back into the classroom…

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Ack! Did Google Make Me a Lazy Teacher?

9/28/2017

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This week Google celebrates its 19th birthday, and the every-day-is-National-Something-Day calendar notes that it’s National Ancestor Day.  So the eternal (and eternally divisive) question of using technology as a teacher, in a way that our early education predecessors could not, floats to the top of my mind.

This week: tech anxiety in planning. Next week: tech in the classroom.

“I don’t know how anyone taught preschool before Pinterest and Amazon and Google!” Every time I say this (and it’s…not entirely infrequent), I feel torn: lucky to have so many resources available, but also…kinda embarrassed. 
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Ack! What if questioning #teacherlife before Pinterest implies that I’m just lazy, or worse, unimaginative? Ack! Do fewer trips to the library mean I’m not living up to our foreteachers? (is foreteachers even a word?! It is now.) Ack! Am I letting someone else come up with ideas for me! Is my teacher brain shriveling?!

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Positive Thinking and Growth Mindset (with Printable!)

9/13/2017

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Happy Wednesday! Today is International Positive Thinking Day! So today’s resource focuses on Positive Thinking and the Growth Mindset.


Say hi to 

Keep Tryin’ Lion and 
​
Keep At It Rabbit!
​See below for a printable tool to use them in your classroom or at home
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Keep Tryin' Lion
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Keep At It Rabbit

If you’re not yet familiar with the Growth Mindset, it’s a way of thinking - backed up by scientific research - to develop perseverance and resilience in the face of difficulty, and it opens up doors to new successful and quantifiable strategies for teachers and parents, in fact for anyone who is with a child when that child encounters something difficult.

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Clang Clang, it's Fire Drill Time! (eek!)

9/6/2017

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It's back to school time, and that means any day now it will be... Fire Drill Time 😱

​I don’t know about you, but every year I dread subjecting my preschoolers to the blaring alarms and bright flashing lights. I know that it’s important for their safety, but it can be scary and overwhelming for a little person.

One year my co-teacher and I felt that it would be helpful to create a fun, upbeat fire drill song, and we noticed that the students LOVED its sing-songy playful tune and were actually excited for fire drills!

The children enjoyed both singing the words and then silently mouthing the words to practice being quiet for the drill.

Click Below to learn the best Fire Drill Song for preschoolers!

CLICK HERE to request the FREE printable PDF of the fire safety poster pictured! (8.5'x11', no watermark) (we're still working on our email automation, but we'll get you the printable PDF file very promptly!)


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Favorite Books to Inspire Dramatic Play

8/30/2017

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Happy Wednesday again! Caroline here with our go-to books as a basis for lessons full of creative play. Many of these are deservedly well-loved classics. They are my favorites because each one is so rich with possibility, in different ways for different age groups.  At this point, I can't pass up an opportunity to explore with these books and I ONLY read them out loud to kids when I know we will have time to create our own imaginary worlds right afterwards 😍

They work well in small settings too, if you’re looking for some fun parent-child or family time activity.
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I’m A Frog! 
from Mo Willems’ Elephant & Piggie series.
​

If you’re not familiar with this one - or if you’re familiar with every other Elephant & Piggie except this one, here’s the rundown: 
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Piggie pretends to be a frog...
Elephant worries (dramatically and with great panache, of course) that Piggie really IS a frog...
Piggie assures Elephant it is pretend, and that anyone can pretend... 
Elephant overcomes his anxiety and pretends to be a cow.
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A great book for those very young and/or just beginning to grasp the concept of cooperative intentional dramatic play, use it as a jumping off point for a conversation about pretending, giving each child the opportunity to demonstrate for the class how to pretend that he/she is something else, or inviting the children as a group to pretend they are something - show me how a horse runs! Don’t forget to shake your horse tail! 


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Building Community, Heart to Heart

8/23/2017

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Pardon the 80s-tastic graphic, but Heart to Heart really is one of my favorite community-building activities for my class! It can be used for almost any age group and takes no more than twenty minutes.  It works particularly well during a meeting time when students can communicate directly with each other, using kind and complimentary words.  

I recommend setting a time in your schedule to do this once a week.  I usually end with this activity every Friday.  We think it's a beautiful way to start the weekend.  
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Circle up with your class and put the names of all the students and even teachers into a container. I highly recommend laminating the names so you can use the same ones all year long.
(See below for free printable name card template!)

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Material Must-Haves!

8/15/2017

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Happy Wednesday! Danielle here. This is a list of my top five Material Must-Haves in any early childhood classroom.  These materials make my life so much easier and ultimately save my class and school money.  
Note: we do not receive any commission for these recommendations, they’re just products we love, and links to places we found them at a good value.
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Reusable Dry Erase Pockets
These are the best!  Forget having to laminate EVERYTHING your students use, just slip a sheet of paper in one of these and they’re ready to go. Organize them by student or by topic, just slide the new sheets in front of the old (or use double-sided). Sturdier than a sheet protector, more portable and versatile than a dry-erase board.

In addition to student use, I like to pin them up (with the grommet at the top) to use for erasable class signs like "There are __ days until Thanksgiving!"  I also use them in place of a folder sometimes, to store sheets or activity-prep materials together, easily see what's inside, and label it without using up a post-it every time I change the contents. Also sold (sometimes more cheaply) as shop tickets.

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Multicolor
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Monochromatic
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 Dry-erase markers

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