With the first snow fall last week, we broke out our winter books. The first we read is "Last Leaf, First Snowflake to Fall" by Leo Yerxa. This is a beautiful poem about a journey during that last day of the leaves falling and waking up to a blanket covered in snow. Some pages have no text but two have only text. These scare the children. It is a nice piece that conveys the tone for that moment of moving between the parts of the circle. There is also quite a lot for discussion and we thought about what it might be like to wake up with snow on your blanket. Would you be as excited as we get when we experience it out a window?
New to our roster this year is one of the Daphnie Odjig books called "Nanabush and the Spirit of Winter". In this story, Nanabush is asked by the people to talk to the North Wind and ask him to stop making winter all the time. Nanabush reluctantly agrees to go, promises the Wind that he won't trick him and tricks him. The girls were very interested that Nanabush is the son of the West Wind, so he was really just going to see his uncle. According to the story, we get summer each year because Nanabush takes some soup to the North Wind and it is so delicious, that the Wind eats it even thought the soup steals his cold for a while. I liked that some of the people were just grumbling about the cold and some who wanted to try and change things. I enjoy having these books for special times and I think it makes us more methodical about reading through our books. I hope it makes happy memories for the children, even as they complain and hang upside down as I read. The cat is our girl Ginger, eating a ginger snap.
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