Division 9 read the book Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes.  We used this book to illustrate how unkind words can “wrinkle” your heart.

The main character, Chrysanthemum loves her long, beautiful name – until she starts kindergarten and the other children tease her about it.  Chrysanthemum starts feeling badly about herself and doesn’t want to go to school anymore.

As we read the book aloud, each time someone was unkind to Chrysanthemum, we crinkled up a paper enlargement of her skipping off to her first day of school.

At the end of the story, we tried to smooth out the paper, but we couldn’t fix it completely.  The paper served as a visual and tactile reminder that our words are powerful and can hurt others if we’re not careful.

Then we talked about the link between words, actions and feelings.

Math connection:  Chrysanthemum has 13 letters in her name.  We made a graph of the number of letters in each of our names.  We know that most people have 5 letters in their name and one person has 7.