We Are All Alike, We Are All Different

Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King!

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we celebrated how we are the same and how we are different. We talked about peace and being kind to everyone, a simple summary of Dr. King's message. 

What's a celebration without a party?!?

After reading We are All Alike...We are All Different, 

we talked about how we are alike and how we are different- our eye and hair color, our gender, our families, our skin color, where we live... Even though we're not all the same, we can all be friends and be kind to one another.

I have a dream...

We read some of Dr. King's speech about his dreams for the world. 

We talked about dreams. Things like, what is my dream for when I grow up? What is my dream for the world? What can I do to change the world?

We wrote our dreams on "cloud" shapes and then glued on some cotton balls to make it look like a dream...

I can dream like Martin Luther King...

We're all different colors on the outside, like all of the people in The Colors of Us, 

colors like cinnamon, honey, chocolate, french toast, etc. We placed our hands in the middle of our circle so we could see all the different colors.

Look at all of those beautiful colors!

After reading The Crayon Box that Talked 

and talking more about differences and how wonderful it is to be different- to be "who we are", we used all of the colors to paint our hands. We printed them and added lyrics written by Ben Harper-

"I can change the world

with my own two hands

make a better place

with my own two hands

make a kinder place

with my own two hands"...

Wild West

We headed out on the range to the Wild West. 

We read Cowpokes to get us started and to give us an idea what it was like to ride the range and live in the wild west...
 

There were horses to ride and cows to wrangle.
We wore cowpoke hats and boots for our dramatizations.

We sat around the campfire,

strummed our guitars and laid our sleepy heads on our bedrolls as we looked up at the nighttime sky. We sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "Home on the Range".

Just like in Matthew the Cowboy, 

we used branding irons (potatoes on a stick) each with our own brands (the first letter of our name and our hand prints) and decorated bandannas or kerchiefs to wear out on the range, to keep the dust out of our noses and mouths.

 

We also learned all about rodeos when we read I Want to be a Cowboy. 

We tried our hand at barrel racing. We donned our cowpoke apparel and galloped a horse around a barrel to the tune of "She'll Be Comin' Around the Mountain". We threw our hats up in the air and hollered, "YeeHaw!" just like they do in the rodeo.

 We practiced using a lasso to rope a stray horse.

Harmony Jean has some pretty fancy boots in Armadillo Rodeo. Bo mistakes her shiny red boots for another armadillo. 

We used tempera paint sticks to design our own cowpoke hats and boots. We talked about all of the "designs" in the book and some of us used those as inspiration for our own designs. 

Wanted posters were made with us in our "cowpoke garb".  Who wouldn't "want" these adorable cowpokes?

We chanted the fingerplay:
10 galloping horses came to town
5 were black.
5 were brown.
They galloped up.
They galloped down.
And then they galloped

out of town!

We told stories about us and our favorite horses...

We had fun eating our "cowboy lunch" around the campfire. We had pigs in a blanket, beans and apples. 

Yee Haw!