“If we talk, the flowers will talk” - Luna

According to Lowenfeld, children begin their drawing process as early as they can physically hold a drawing utensil. From their first attempts at a drawing, consisting of random marks and lines, to their first representational drawing, children are making efforts to communicate to the world around them and establish meaning through the images they create (Brittain & Lowenfeld, 1987).

According to Luna, "If we talk, the flowers will talk"  illustrates a relationship between us and the flowers around us in Luna’s perception. Her perception is the way in which she thinks or feels about it. By expressing oneself, the heart is released.

Understanding the significance of illustrations in the storybooks to deliver messages, we invite our minds to unravel through our visual perception. Visual perception has an impact on our categorization and narratives to appreciate the meaning of the story and enhance our visual perception. 

In this beautifully illustrated book, Peter H. Reynolds once again invites us to observe, to wonder, and to consider the many ways, sometimes life offers us, to pursue. He includes an oak leaf, beside the rabbit, the boy, and the north star, as one of the characters which catch a glimpse of our interest of leaves.

From our walks, we've been collecting dropped leaves on the ground, which come in different sizes and shapes. During the sharing of this story, we purposely pause on a specific page which narrates ...

One day the boy saw an oak leaf drift
and land on the water. 

He wondered how the leaf managed to float ... the way the stars
​seemed to float in the night sky. 

When we read a story, we definitely like to dive in ourselves.  Pausing allows us to be immersed in the story and to be inspired to further comprehend. Pauses when reading aloud play an essential role in reading and listening comprehension (Godde et al., 2020). 

As we pause during reading, we give ourselves room to evaluate our own understanding of the narratives and to connect the new knowledge to what we already know. 

In addition, pauses give us time to make connections. In other words, we can say pausing to connect. It is a reading strategy that helps us gain deeper understanding on the narratives we read. During pauses, we allow ourselves to ask questions as follows:

• What does floating (in the air) mean?
• How does it look like?
• What makes it different from flying?

Moreover, when it comes to our interest of the relationship between vibrations and sounds, we think back about the different sounds that we can forward explore through various exploration and learning experiences. We always like to challenge ourselves with the new possibilities or challenges. Since we have worked with an a string phone experiment, this time round awe are interested to try out a new idea of how are vibrations carried through a medium?

We closely notice the movements of the rice. Vivaan focuses on the concepts of the distance, of tambourine from the rice on top of a firmly covered bowl, and says, “The rice moves when we play the tambourine closely and when the tambourine is far the rice doesn’t move”.

Going further with our learning of vibration we are considering a few options of solid, liquid, or gas to be a medium of our sound vibration. This time round we choose water as a medium to visualize sound waves and detect the motion. 

When asked to describe her observation, Elie mentions, "Sometimes the vibration is too fast so we cannot see it".

Nora makes connections between the sound and vibration through zig zag lines as the sound vibrates and the straight line underneath as the water.

Vivaan illustrates his drawing with vibrating lines as sound waves while two people are talking. 
Felix: "The machine which is cutting the tree and it vibrates when it works".

Along with our experience of sound and vibration, we also converse about the leaves that we have read in “The North Star”. We encounter floating and sinking during our learning experience too when we put the leaves on the water.

Knowing how Luna loves butterflies, each one of us works with with a lovely representation of butterflies and its symmetry. We note how butterflies, as part of nature, are symmetrical. We ask ourselves are each of their wings the same as the other?

We put all the butterflies together on a canvas to present it to Luna as our way to keep our beautiful memories alive. It is definitely not easy to say farewell; however, we are grateful life has come to another interesting journey for our dear friend to encounter. 

A Butterfly came flying by

And I thought I knew her face 
She landed on my shoulder
And spread her wings of love

I looked and saw her smiling
And she winked
And flew away

I am sure I heard her whisper
We'll meet again
One day.

Kindest,
Children & Friends.