What’s in a picture?
A lot apparently. This we discovered at St. Inez MOP this Tuesday.
It’s a wet day outside and right on cue, today we’re all huddled in the little temple space ready to read The Sea in a Bucket. This is a book about a little boy named Sonu who is ready to fill his bucket with water from a tap. As the book unfolds, the perspective of where water comes from keeps getting wider to ultimately include the bigger picture.
And, so it was that we read the book together in a Reader’s Theatre format where each child had a part of the text to read. Once this was done, we opened up the big book, and carefully took in the illustrations on each page; discussing the details, pointing out things that we noticed, we looked at where the water was coming from, what the various people in the scene were doing….. there was so much to look at.
We took our own time with the book and when we were through….we were happy. But this is not where it ended. We then took out our activity books and opened up the big book on the floor before us. Then, pencils in hand, we each set out to create an A-Z with objects that we found in the illustrations in the book.
The kids sat around the book and peered intently as they began filling in their respective lists. I hovered around helping out and assisting with spellings, trying to fill in the blanks….and then before long, I began my own list – almost a bucket list of a different kind, because Sonu started it all !
Our collective lists looked something like this:
A- animals
B- bucket/ basket
C-cycle/clothes/census
D- dog/door
E- Earth
F- flowers/flags/fish/frog/fence
G- grass
H-hen/house
I- ice
J- jug
K- kurta
L- lizard/ leaf
M- monk/ monastery
N- net
O- ocean
P- pipes/palms/poster
Q-
R-roof
S- sun/shower/slippers/sailboat
T- toothbrush/ tap/ trees
U- umbrella
V- van
W-water
X-
Y- yak
Z-
We loved how Avehi Abacus and Eklavya brought this concept of the water cycle alive and in many ways we lived the water cycle by exploring Deepa Balsaver’s rich illustrations and building our vocabulary around a concept, while it rained outside, our learning cycle continued.