Happy Happy

My birthday fell on a Thursday a few weeks ago. I was planning on doing a birthday project during PreK Art Lunch, but we didn't have class because of the blizzard. As I mentioned earlier, I wasn't happy with the books I had anyways, so it all worked out.

This past Thursday was Ms. Jane's birthday. Jane Cornett is in charge of all of the Jane's Place after school programming at Nettelhorst. She has always supported me, since I came to her last year with my idea to teach "Under the Influence....of Art." This year, when I told her I wanted to teach a class to Ms. Nakamura's 1/2-day prekindergarten students, she was open to the idea. With the class being in the middle of the day, space was limited, but she helped me work that out as well, and we now have a wonderful class every Thursday.

So, in honor of Ms. Jane's birthday, we finally did a birthday project, though it wasn't the one I had originally planned, and I found a great book for this one. "The Birthday Fish" is about a little girl who always wished for a pony for her birthday and never got one. She even had a name, Marigold, picked out for the pony. When she opened the gift from her parents that she was hoping would be a very small pony, she was disappointed to find it was a fish. The story shows in a whimsical way how she formed a relationship with the fish (the fish begged her not to dump it down the drain), and in the end, she loved the fish and named it Marigold. It teaches us that we might not always get what we wish for, but it might be exactly what we end up wanting. 

So, we made fish, and they turned out adorable.