This Thanksgiving week truly does resemble the Thanksgiving song “Over the River and Through the Woods,” unlike any others I can remember.  The children have certainly been enjoying their time outside in the white stuff, pulling friends in sleds, having snowball fights, and attempting to drive the large trucks around.We continued to practice our songs for our performance, working in small groups with Susan to practice on the instruments, and in the large group all together.We continued to read stone soup stories and watched a couple more stone soup storytelling videos and listened to Pete Seeger’s telling of Some Friends to Feed.  We also read several books about Thanksgiving and being grateful.  We shared things each day that we are thankful for – the most common being family, and the second being school.  It was so joyous to listen to all the things that the children shared, and to feel that they truly were thoughtful about their gratitude.  We created a Thankful tree, where children wrote or dictated things that they are thankful for on a leaf, bird, or star, and hung them on the thankful tree.Stone soup preparation began on Monday and continued through our short week.  The children each had a turn washing, peeling, and chopping up vegetables.  They carefully held their vegetable and peeled away from themselves as shown, and diligently sliced them into pieces, sawing back and forth until they finally separated.  It was hard work and took a lot of careful concentration and attention, but everyone stuck with it until they had completed their task.On Wednesday morning the children shook, and shook, and shook up jars of cream until they finally (almost 2 hours later) turned into butter, which we enjoyed with our bread and crackers during our stone soup feast.Everyone was so excited to welcome families to join us for soup.  There was a choice of a creamy carrot & potato soup, or a vegetables in broth soup.  Some children had several bowls, trying both types, and some selected one or the other.  It was fun to sit together as a community to eat and enjoy friendly conversation.
We hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your families and we look forward to our Winter Celebration in a few weeks!