Happy Belated Chinese New Year!

Kindergarten Day USA and China
(A Flip-Me-Over Book)
by Trish Marx and Ellen B. Senisi
A Global Fund for Children Book
Charlesbreidge, 2010
review copy provided by the publisher

Jesse T. Zoller Elementary School is in Schenectady, New York. Little Oak Children's House is in Beijing, China. Kindergarten classes from both of these schools share this book.

Read from one side and you are in kindergarten in the United States: learning to read, coloring, eating lunch, playing with friends at recess, celebrating a birthday, and thinking about China while you practice telling time and look at the globe.

Flip the book over and you are in kindergarten in China: learning to read, coloring, eating lunch, playing with friends at recess, celebrating a birthday, and thinking about the United States while you use your fingers to count and look at a map of the world.

This is a great book for exploring similarities and differences, for comparing and contrasting, for thinking and understanding. It would be fun to do a kindergarten photo essay from lots of different kindergarten rooms in the same school district to see how different things are even when we think they are going to be more the same. What if we compared kindergarten in the city to kindergarten in a rural school? More the same, or more different?

And on the subject of photo essays, wouldn't it be fun to have kids bring in pictures of their bedrooms to compare and contrast? (You know you loved it when we shared pictures of our classrooms...but of course I can't find links to any of those posts...)