Box Lunch Social

Waiting for the program to start (Can you tell which direction the teacher is standing in?!)

Mrs. Symes (Michael's 2nd grade teacher) held a special event for her students to celebrate their moms. Today, I had the opportunity to escape my regular duties and head upstairs for quite a treat. The day started with poetry recitals.

The first was a very cute group poem about all the wonderful things about moms ended by Michael's statement of "I'll thank you with a kiss" and all the kids blew kisses to the lovely moms in the audience.

Next, they each wrote individual poems and read them to us. Michael's says: "Helpful when I'm stuck, Playing with me in my room, Reading with me at night."

The next part of the program was a movie that the class made using the school's green screen technology. Each child got to stand in front of the green screen (which turned into a hand-made picture they had drawn) and recited "The most important thing about my mom is. . . ." Michael says, "The most important thing about my mom is that she helps other people and she is very smart."

The final portion we worked on together. The assignment was to create a box lunch that was special for you both that you could share. Since Michael has such a love for zoo animals and aspires to be a zoo keeper when he grows up, we decided to use that as our theme. We chose to use Jessy's Easter basket since it was such a nice green the color of grass. We glued the zoo animals around the basket, then looked up interesting facts about some of the animals on the internet. These facts included their scientific name, something about the animal, and their life expectancy. These were printed, cut out, and glued around the side of the basket.

The most fun was deciding what would be in the basket that we would eat for lunch. As you can see, we had quite the feast. Even our food fit our theme. We thought about how to represent the types of foods the zoo animals would eat. We decided that the grass and leaf eaters (like the giraffes, Michael's personal favorite) could be represented by salad. To satisfy the lions and tigers and other meat eaters, we added ham to the salad. We ended up with a fancy home-made chef salad with mozarella cheese, hard-boiled eggs, olives, and shaved almonds. We also had bananas for the monkeys, nutter-butter cookies for the elephants, yogurt, and animal crackers. Mmmmm, what a lunch!

Thank you Michael! I love you very much!!