Learning with Beautiful Stuff

After two weeks of collecting, it was finally Bag Opening Day!

We gathered at the tables, gave each child his or her bag and then began emptying the bags onto the table. Before this point, we had class meetings to talk about the Beautiful Stuff becoming part of our classroom and that, at least for a little while, the treasures would stay at school rather than be glued together and taken home.
As we sifted through the treasures, we began talking about how to organize it all. The children at Kim’s table thought it should be sorted by the way it felt (soft, squishy and hard). The children at Amanda’s and Catherine’s tables decided to sort by color.
When the ‘soft, squishy, hard’ containers became too full and overflowed, they decided to try sorting by color also.