I never thought that when I choose the book Papa, please get the moon for me how far we could explore the book and its ideas. The children get fascinated by the fact that Monica`s papa is able to climb a ladder and actually get the moon for her. There is one condition though: he needs to wait for the moon to get smaller.
Suddenly, I realized how the book explores all the phases of the moon. Showing the moon getting smaller to be picked by the papa and also disappearing as a warning that a new moon is about to come in the sky. The moon will get bigger and bigger again.
I showed the children three shapes. The first one was a crescent moon; they right away recognized this as the “shape of a moon”. I told them that sometimes we look at the sky at night and we can`t find the moon. It`s still there though. It`s just in the dark waiting for a New Moon to start. That shape is the shape of a crescent moon.
When I showed the second shape, Luigi new right away, it was a “half-circle”. I told the child that the shape was a half-circle, but also a half-moon. Which means the moon is growing bigger.
The third shape came with a shout from them “that`s a full a moon!”. How about the shape?! Aston answered, “it is a circle!”
I pasted the 3 shapes on a white paper for each of them and asked them to paint with dark paint, like the sky in the dark. We used a lot of sprinkles as stars.
A week later, once the paints were dry, I removed the shapes and handed their work back to them. They just loved it and we were again able to talk about the phases of the moon we learned.
To finish our lesson that day, we used our Papa, please get the moon for me in felts to tell the story using the overhead projector. We all had to check our shadows on the wall before starting it though!
