I Live in Dunkirk, Not Earth

I began our Morning Meeting on Friday with a new song, “When Dogs Get Up in the Morning.”  The children had already been watching the wonderful show outside our window as trucks and trailers arrived to unload the animals with whom we would spend our day.  The song is a great one and you will hear the children singing it, changing the nouns to different animals and singing the sounds they make.  Xavier sang it throughout rest time, even creating a variation for cars–“vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, That is what they say.”  We did a circle dance around our sun and sang, “The Earth Goes ’round the Sun.”  I moved to a discussion about things we love in the world as preparation for reading, “I Love You, Earth.”  Mrs. A’Hearn and I were the only people in the room who raised our hands in answer to the question, Who lives on Earth?  One child dismissed us saying, “I live in Dunkirk, not Earth.”  It’s an important reminder of the developmental realities of preschool thinking.  We smiled and continued our discussion that everything we named is on Earth with us (including Dunkirk and Maryland).