Each December, I teach my kindergarten students a unit on holiday traditions around the world. My students are always surprised to learn that there are different holidays celebrated around the world and how different they can be from what we celebrate here in America. As my students still believe in Santa, and I don't want to spoil that for them, I highly emphasize the fact that the different holiday traditions (ours, as well as those from other cultures) are celebrated all over the world. That families decide how they celebrate. This story would help emphasize that point as the mother decided to celebrate Christmas as she did as a child and introduced that tradition to her son even though they had never celebrated Christmas before.

In the unit I teach, I like to include a craft for each culture that we study. This story shows the mother creating origami paper cranes. While the cranes would be difficult for my 5 and 6 year old students to make, we could make some simple origami shapes. I would also offer a new center during our play center time offering the students origami paper and easy to follow patterns and help them further explore this art form if they are interested.

This story would be easy to incorporate into the Kindergarten classroom. The pictures are very colorful and illustrate the story nicely. The story isn't too long and would easily hold the attention of my students. They would be able to relate to the main character and his actions. It would open up the possibility of many beneficial discussions in the classroom.

"Tree of Cranes" is a great picture book to read with elementary age children. I read this book to my first grade students as an introduction to studying Christmas in Japan as a part of our "Christmas Around the World" unit. My students and I enjoyed the wonderful, colorful illustrations. My students easily related themselves to the boy in the story because he appears to be about the same age. Also the book triggered a wonderful conversation about how the boy didn't listen to his mother and how dangerous that can be for all children. I pointed out also the differences in what the mother from the story does for her son that is sick, and we talked about what our own mothers do when we are sick. Students were very interested to see similarities between the two.
The students also discussed similarities and differences in ways that they celebrate, traditions, etc. and compared and contrasted the Japanese traditions listed in the book. Students found that the boy one receives one gift, and is very happy with it, many of them typically received multiple gifts. As in the story, my class discussed how Christmas focuses on giving more than receiving when the boy makes a promise to his mother to never go tot the pond again.

After reading this book with my class, we made our own "Tree of Cranes" by creating a crane with origami, as the boy's mother used in the story. The origami was a challenge for some, but many turned out beautiful. We continued our discussion by having a guest speaker from Japan to continue to share with us Japanese traditions and customs at Christmas. OUr guest was very pleased to see our trees of cranes.