Throughout the holidays, the children often come to preschool telling me about all the things they either hope to get for Christmas or give for Christmas to mom and dad. Â Today, we had fun putting a new spin on the gift giving process with the help of a new book and an empty box…
We started our day by reading the book “The Gift of Nothing” by Patrick McDonnell. This book is about a cat who wants to give his friend (a dog) a gift but is having trouble finding something to give because this dog already has everything.  So after much thinking, the cat ends up giving the dog a box with nothing inside – the gift of nothing…
This is a book about friendship, gift giving, and throughout the book, the author uses the words “something” and “nothing” which naturally leads to lots of fun ways to highlight the concepts of nothing, something, empty, full, and zero…
After reading our book, the children passed around a gift of nothing I brought for them. Each child opened the empty box and then reached inside to pull out their gift of nothing…
The children were encouraged to use their imagination to fill the box with something then reach inside and pull out something from the box of nothing. As the children passed the box around the circle those who wished to do so could tell us all what they imagined was in the box…
We have lots of three year old’s so we ended up with quite a few pairs of underwear being the “something” that was inside the gift of nothing. Â I took a turn too only my something was an imaginary heart for each child…
We also played a short listening game. Â I filled small gift boxes with different objects like pom-poms, bells, rocks, and left one filled with nothing…
As I shook each box, the children listened to determine which boxes had something inside and which boxes had nothing inside…
Then we sorted them into two stacks and opened them up to see if we had guessed right…
At the tables, the children found empty boxes to paint with. It was funny because it took several of the children to figure out that the goal was to paint with the edges of the box rather than the entire box…
The children would dip the open side of the box into the paint then pick it up and say “there is no paint inside the box!” Â So I demonstrated how we could paint with the edges of the box…
Our gift of nothing turned out to be a full day of somethings!….
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