Students have spent a lot of time this year looking closely at themselves. We've practiced self-portraits in homeroom through painting and drawing, and in art class with mixing colors of crayons and colored pencils. This week, we decided to make a self-portrait out of items we found right outside our classroom door! Students collected items from County Farm Park to create self-portraits.
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As part of our All About Me Identity Books, the class is talking lots about FAMILY and what our own families are like! This week we read The Family Book and discussed how all families are different! Every student designed a house (though we discussed how not ALL families live together in one single house) and drew their family members inside.
For our first theme of the year, Identity, students are recording what it means to be them! Each student is working on an identity book that is all about them. We practiced the art of collaging while making our covers!
Kindergartners have been exploring number lines in math. We learned that number lines help us to order numbers from small to BIG. They also help us count, add, and subtract! Students have learned about number lines in a variety of ways. We've used our full bodies for life-size number line games, developed fine motor skills through cutting/gluing numbers onto our number lines and creating number books, and got creative with Q-Tip painting!
To be a Kindergarten teacher, you have to be flexible and open to the infinite ideas these students are constantly exploring -- and quick enough to connect them to your learning goals! Last week, though I had my math plans ready and organized, I scrapped all of them in lieu of the great math work Kindergartners were already naturally and organically engaging in. Students were fascinated with digging holes, tunnel systems, and dams. They were measuring their depth and length, noticing the speed of water, counting the amount of tools we had available to use...without even being prompted by their math teacher! I decided to make this into our math journey for the week. We began by digging out our design without water. We measured our plan: how deep was it? Were all spots the same depth? How long was it? We used out bodies and shovels to help us measure, then we wrote this down. We made predictions: Where would the water fill in first? Would the depth increase? Decrease? Would our dam work? We turned the hose on and began observing. Things moved pretty quickly and the Kindergartners were all over it, observing closely, stepping in to change the design, sharing tools, etc. This is what meaningful math looks like in our classroom!
Three special friends saw me trying to mark spots on our line-up spot in the courtyard and decided to help me out! Connor, Isobel, and Jack helped pick colors, numbers, and shapes to paint on the courtyard wall so that our class can line up safely with enough space.
Students in the Kindergarten class have been fascinated by the tiny treasures we can find all around us outside. We decided to take a couple of hikes through County Farm Park, across the street, to see what we could find! Students collected special items and as a class we laid them out in the classroom to examine when we returned to school. We worked on classifying and sorting our objects -- we put flowers together, mushrooms in a group, rocks to one side, leaves to another, etc. -- and counted how many we had in each group. Although this didn't take place during math time, this shows how project time can really integrate many disciplines! Students created sketches of their favorite finds and practiced writing about their objects.
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About MichelleMichelle has been a part of the Summers-Knoll community since 2015. Before teaching Kindergarten, Michelle taught 3rd and 4th grade. Archives
May 2021
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