Heartprints

100 Acts of Kindness…Share a Heartprint!

Our goal for the rest of the month of February is to complete, as a group, at least 100 acts of kindness- to hang at least 100 “heartprints” in our art gallery.

Each child has been given an envelope filled with paper hearts or “heartprints” to take home. When parents see their child being kind at home or out and about, they are encouraged to write what they did on a “heartprint” and have them bring it to Rainbow Connection the next time they come. We will hang the “heartprints” up around our “art gallery” so that we can see the progress we are making.

To help the kiddos at Rainbow Connection understand how they can promote kindness, we will begin by reading a book titled, Heartprints by P.K. Halliman. Throughout the book, there are many different acts of kindness illustrated by the characters in the book and surrounding each act of kindness are lots of heartprints…

We will talk about being kind to each other and to also look for kindness being shared by others here or at home. As I see the children being kind to one another here, I will print their act of kindness on a heart and put it on our wall… As they see someone being kind, they will be encouraged to give them a heart to hang on the wall.

Russian Winter Festival

We traveled to Moscow to attend their Winter Festival. They are held in many cities in Russia every year from mid-December to mid-January. We celebrated winter with some traditional Russian culture.

We read a book about a little girl bunny who discovers she loves ice skating. It’s called Bella Gets Her Skates On by Ian Whybrow.

We listened and ice skated to Tchaikovsky’s famous “Nutcracker” Ballet. We used paper plates as our ice skates.

We also used colored ice cubes to “ice skate” around and around on paper to create some beautiful, colorful masterpieces.

A cookie sheet of ice provided us with a rink of real ice where we used little characters as the ice skaters. Spiderman, Batman and Pooh Bear loved spinning on the ice.

A favorite activitiy of the week was playing with matryoshkas- Russian nesting dolls and a popular Russian symbol. They typically depict women

in traditional Russian attire. Ours were little snowpeople. They make a great manipulative for small children and provided us with lots of imaginary play.

We loved reading The Mitten over and over again. It’s written by Jan Brett who characterizes Russian culture in many of her books. This book was about a little boy in Ukraine whose Baba (grandma in Ukraine) knitted him some snow white mittens.

We sat in a mitten shape as we read the story and then we used mittens of our own to try on and fill with animals as we retold the story.

We also had mitten shapes to fill with animal stickers.

Ice sculptures and snow people fill the streets in celebration of winter. We brought some snow in from outside to mold and paint. Even the littlest of us got into the act!

Another day we used food coloring, salt and rock salt to create some awesome sculptures of ice.  As the salt melted the ice, little caves and crevices were formed for some amazing sculptures.

After reading a Russian folktale, The Snow Child,

by Freya Littledale,

we did an experiment with snow to see what makes it melt and what makes it stay cold. We tried putting baggies of snow in sunny windows, shady spots outside, the freezer and the refrigerator.

We decided that having a "snow child" was not such a good idea!