Learning Through the Eyes of a Kindergartener
‘The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.’
― William Arthur Ward
Self Identity
Exploring different facial feature through multiple mediums
This is an example of how we explore self identity each year in my classroom.It varies based off the children's ability and interests in the topic. This year we had several class discussions about how everybody is different; not only in their skin tone but also the shape of their eyes, head, nose, mouth, etc. To build upon these discussions, the children were invited to focus on a single facial feature as they drew. They were invited to explore with a large mirror and special thinking pens so they could focus specifically on shapes. This allowed the children to focus on the small details. For example, while exploring the eyes, they saw their many tiny eyelashes. Elena opened her eye lid to look at her eye. “I have a thousand lashes.” She added several lines to the eye on her paper.
After working on several specific facial features, the children were invited to begin using recycled materials to construct their faces. They would have to be very specific with the materials to try to see what they would need for their face. Abby, “I have a green eye and a brown eye.” She grabbed a green pebble and brown rock to represent each eye. he children not only worked on specific drawing and representing skills, but were becoming very detail oriented. They began to notice specific features about their faces and the faces of others. As the year goes on, we would like to begin looking at skin tones and how they can use their knowledge of color mixing to represent themselves.
Animals
Learning about animals and their habitats
Last year, as a way to reflect on our learning, we created our web on all of the animals we had learned about throughout the school year. Throughout the entire year we exploring the different habitats what animals needs in order to survive. We went outside and explored the animals on our play ground as well as researched more about our classroom pets.
The first step in making the web was to learn how to use the SMART board. They learned how to write on it, insert shapes, change colors and how to connect shapes with lines. All of these skills prepared them to create our web. They started off by looking at the old web and decided what we needed on ours. The students worked together to insert the shapes and connect those shapes with lines. They then wrote the words inside of the shapes. The children we asked to recall all of the animals that we explored this year. The next step was to add the pictures. We compiled all of the pictures into a folder. The children learned to insert the picture then move it to the corresponding animal. The final step in our web making process was to add the words. The children were called to the SMART board one by one to give their dialogue for the pictures. All of the quotes on the web are the children looking back at what they had learned. After they inserted the pictures they were asked to think about what they learned about that animal.
Geography
Exchanging post cards with classrooms from around the world
This year the preschool and kindergarten children took part in a preschool post card exchange with 10 schools from around the world. We designed our own post card by using our hands as the shape of Michigan. We sent the other schools information about our school as well as some information about Michigan. Once that postcards went out, we anxiously awaited the arrival of the post cards from the other countries. Over the next few months the post cards slowly started arriving.
Each time we would get mail from another school we showed the children the contents as well as looked up the location on the map. This brought up discussions on what the weather was like in the area and how far away from us it was. We would map quest how long it took for us to drive to that place. The contents of the envelopes were always different and always gave us a look into a new culture. The children's favorite was from ireland and scotland. We explored these countries further by building the falkirk wheel, dancing to highland dancing and learning to say Irish phases.