Look at this picture. Isn’t it cute?
I took it the other day during our Stuffed Animal Day in writing class, after my sixth graders had gone off to Library. I love how they left their animals in their seats. We have a Stuffed Animal Day as part of a prompt around descriptive writing — they have to use good descriptive details to describe one of the animals in the room, and we have to guess which one it is. (Gets tricky when there are 20 or 30 animals lined up along the shelf).
But there is another reason, too, and it is one of those things that I forgot about until the day arrived. You should have seen how excited these sixth graders (soon to be seventh graders) were when they arrived with their stuffed animals. Some were very protective of them; others tossed their animals around.
It reminded me of how we really need to continue to value the connections to their childhoods. This often gets lost in the need for pushing through our curriculum, driving them to do their best on standardized testing, and working hard at learning all year long. This connection to the innocence of their age gets lost in all that, and yet a simple activity like Stuffed Animal Day …. it brings it all right back into the classroom.
Peace (in the stuffies),
Kevin