During our morning circle time, our friends greet each other and talk about who is not in school (absent) each day. Every time we check our attendance, the first name our children say out loud is "Parker," even though they know that he moved to a new school and is not coming back to Buckle My Shoe. One day, Parker's mom Tara, sent Clare an email with Parker's picture. When the children saw a picture of Parker, they all shared that they missed Parker. Ever since that day, we decided to send a letter to Parker! We wrote our letter and decorated it with colorful paint to send to Parker with the help of teachers.
Then we wondered: how do we send our letter to Parker? Nico said, we can "run to his house." Mia, Emilio, and Levi said, it can be sent via "airplane." Mia later added that it can be sent by "car." The children were welcome to come up with their own theories of how we could send the letter to Parker. When the educators asked who would be going on an airplane to deliver the letter to Parker, they all shouted "Me" or "Clare." We did not want to discourage their imagination of how a letter gets sent, so we shifted the activities into learning something more specific.
The educators put out a miniature mailbox in the morning and wrote a couple of questions: "What do you think this is? What do we do with it?" Many children knew that it was a mailbox where we put letters and cards in the slots. Some children wondered who would be taking out all that mail. Others wondered, "Why is it so blue?" Although we have started to understand the concept of writing a letter to people that we love, we haven't quite figured out how these letters get sent to them. We will continue to explore and observe how the children can come up with their own conclusions!
