Umbrella Day at Merritt Academy
About Hallmarks at Merritt Academy
At Merritt Academy we love highlighting hallmark traditions at each age and stage of our learning journey. Our students and staff look forward to celebrating special hallmark experiences throughout the year. Each hallmark reinforces Merritt’s curricular concepts and educational philosophy.
Under my Umbrella – Lessons about Kindness
In spring, when our young students learn about weather, our K3 classes eagerly anticipate Umbrella Day. Rain or shine, our three-year-olds parade around campus holding their umbrellas high.
Preparing for Umbrella Day, we enjoy sharing stories like The Big Umbrella with our preschoolers. In the book, the big umbrella has room for everyone who needs shelter from the rain.
Co-authors Amy June Bates and her young daughter Juniper came up with the book idea one rainy day. They were about to leave the house and realized they had only one umbrella. Fortunately for the Bates, the large red umbrella, like the one in the book, was big enough for them both.
Amy Bates has shared that she hopes that the book’s message about kindness will inspire others to believe that the more love you give, the more love comes back. That lesson is one our teachers want to echo among our students at Merritt Academy.
After reading The Big Umbrella, our teachers invite the children to think about who they would invite to join them under their umbrellas of kindness. As part of our character curriculum, we discuss kindness as a value in all our classes. We also talk about how we can express kindness to others. Our preschoolers might draw figures under their umbrellas or describe to the class which family members and friends they would include. As our students grow, it is our wish that their umbrellas will grow even larger.
Umbrella Day and stories like The Big Umbrella, inspire us to think. Who could we invite to join us under our umbrellas?
To learn more about how Merritt Academy intentionally incorporates values like kindness into our students’ learning journey, visit our page about Creating Character.
“ Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. ”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.