The beginning of the year is always
a fun and interesting time in Kindergarten. Every year my students come in with
varying levels of English. This is one of my favorite things about working in
International Schools. We have our first day and everyone is a little bit
nervous, some students come in speaking natively, while some have no prior
knowledge of English; except for the little study session with Mom and Dad
before school reminding them to say, “good morning.”
What makes
this so magical to me is how we can communicate in so many ways without
speaking any of the same languages; they really do have 100 languages!
Among other things, one of the
first things we go over is colors and shapes. We had learned a few songs,
played with tangrams and found shapes in the room and through out the school.
Then one day after school I see one of the magic ingredients for any early
years teacher… CARDBOARD… big boxes, in perfect condition! I am still now sure
who gets more excited, me or the kids.
Another one of my favorite things
about kindergarten is their imagination and creativity. I love working in a
school that uses an inquiry-based curriculum. It really has helped my students
to come up with amazing ideas, that are their own and really drive their own
learning.
So we start out the morning
discussing what I had found. We brainstormed what we could do with these nice
big boxes, and what would they like to create. We made a nice list, and had
some time to share our ideas in pair and group collaboration discussions. After
having to explain our rational and ways we came up with creating a bean bag
toss game based off one of the students weekend experiences, we love tying in
our schema and prior knowledge.
Up next was the design phase. W
discussed what shapes we should put, what size they need to be and how that
would change the difficulty of the game, how much space would we need between
the shapes so that it wouldn't break. It is great to see their thinking
processes and with just a little bit of prompting through questions they can
really solve so many of these problems. After the design team was done we had
the next team ready for action, the decoration team. We cut out the shapes, and
decided they wanted it to be rainbow colored, so got out the paints and got our
hands a little bit messy!
The next group came in, the
execution team. Did we want to make a set of rules, or did we want to create a
list of suggestions? They decided they would draw pictures to give examples of
how to play the game, but wanted to put a few extra pages so that friends could
add different ones. This ended up being an amazing resource for the students,
and a great way to share their ideas.
After a few weeks we had begun
working on number sense. They decided they wanted to start keeping score of
their scores so got dry erase markers and white boards and created their own
original tally system. Some would draw shapes and lines next to them, others
would group them all together.
When talking to them about the game
they told me some holes are harder, so we came up with the idea of making some
shapes worth more points than others. So we got out the marker and discussed
how we should put the numbers and should the bigger holes have smaller or
bigger numbers?
What I hadn’t even realized was
that this would then change their whole scoring system. I sat and observed how
they would change their score keeping. Then before my eyes they were creating
their own math problems and doing simple addition!
It was a
great several week inquiry and an amazing tie into so many different skills.
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