Big Idea of Ferdinand

I love, love the story of Ferdinand.

 If you are not familiar, it's a story from Spain about a bull who grows up different from his other bull counterparts who fight with each other all day; he just likes to sit and smell flowers. Bullfighters come to get the most fierce bull for their bullfighting competition and that day Ferdinand happens to sit on a bee and looks quite mad. They take him to fight and he ends up just sitting and smelling the flowers in the ladies' hair.  (I very much edit the part about the bullfighters at the end, because they are after all only 5 and I don't want them to know about that tradition yet). But the rest of the story I think is very poignant and something many parents have had to deal with themselves, the kids growing up different from other kids. I was probably the only one in the audience when we saw the movie Blind Side several years back who got their reference to the book, the compared the main character there to Ferdinand.

Anyway, I wanted to see if the kids could come up with this Big Idea on their own. So we simply read the story and I sent them to their seats to write. This is what they came up with:

I love that they include "brave".

Just smell the flowers and don't fight.

Other calves like to play but he smells the flowers.

My favorite: you don't have to be like your brothers and sisters, you can just be you!