End of the year exams begin on Monday. Today was the last day suitable to visit the Grade Four class, as promised. At ten o’clock CBN pulled up under a tree. Grade Four were ready. This is a reading school.
Today we worked with the idea of emotions, first with story, then with a game and some discussion and finally with illustration. The children were invited to choose coloured paper to suit emotions they experience. Only one child chose a blue paper to express sadness. Happy yellow papers expressed joy and there were many of those. Red was for anger and some children chose that – those faces are perhaps the most striking. Nobody chose to be jealous with a green paper.
What were they so angry about? The story! In one of the stories we read and discussed, Dad brings home a lion, telling the family it was a dog. Indignation ran quite high.
‘That man should never have done that! The lion could have eaten the children!’
Some were also angry at the bully in the story.
‘I’m angry because the big boy was bullying the small boys.’ This was an interesting result. The class had not been asked to specifically draw something relating to the stories, but some of them did. At the start of the exercise, we talked about books being like passports into other worlds. In this case, that seems to have worked.
To see examples of what they said about their faces, go to: https://www.childrensbook.co.za/news/2013/11/08/how-we-feel
