I decided to address the feeling of being left out at school with my kindergarten class using Leo Lionni’s Swimmy. It is a story about a fish that is a different color from all the other red fish. He happens to be black. While swimming out in the open sea, he sees a very large fish eat all of his friends. When he sets out to find more little fish to hang out with and become his friends, he encounters a very scared group of fish. These fish have seen what happens to little fish when big hungry fish come by and this makes them afraid to go out in the open sea to play. Swimmy decides to take charge and organize the other fish so that they will not become lunch for the bigger fish. When the other fish follow Swimmy’s directions and swim in formation, they appear to be a very large fish with Swimmy the differently colored black fish as the eye. Other large and hungry fish are scared away from what they see as a larger fish than themselves.

    The kids loved this story. Before we read the story, I took out our feelings chart and asked for a volunteer to come up and point to the lonely face. Once the lonely face was in place in the center of the chart, I asked the class to help brainstorm a list of words that they associated with feeling lonely. Some of the words that we came up with were sad, crying, tears, frown, angry, scared, and mad. We then talked about the first day of school and went around the room expressing how we felt upon entering a room where all the faces were new. After the story was read, I then asked the kids to draw a picture of their favorite part of the story and then dictate a sentence or a few words about what they drew.

    I really liked doing this activity with my class because of the fact that it covered such a large academic and social/emotional area. The children were able to learn about and analyze their feelings while practicing their listening, reading and writing skills. We wound up making a class book about the feeling “lonely”.
 
 
 

Sarah Auslander is a graduate of the behavior disorders program in the Dept. of Special Education at Hunter College.  She is a teacher of kindergartners with disabilities.  She would like to thank a fellow student/teacher, Elizabeth Cornwell, for her contributions.   Thanks Sarah! (and Elizabeth)
 
 

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