How We Express Ourselves

Central Idea

Expression of ideas and feelings enrich our culture.

Lines of Inquiry

• Why people choose to express themselves
• Celebrations as a form of cultural expression
• How expression of ideas differ among cultures

Concepts: Function, Form, Causation

Attitudes: Tolerance, curiosity, confidence, creativity

Learner profiles: open-minded, inquirer knowledgeable, communicator 

One goal for myself is to get better at teaching/playing music. I would love to learn to play guitar one day and sing songs to my students. We talked about goals all the time in school. I think it is important to discuss these issues with our students and explain that we as teachers are also life long learners. We share ideas and create personal/academic goals frequently.

Our inquiry cycle is a huge part of my classroom. We are always talking about ways in which we think, act, and reflect. Each unit ends up being worded an organized a bit differently based on our unit of inquiry. For this unit we talked about the questions we ask, how we can investigate, what we create, discussions to deepen our learning, all while reflecting on our learning.

So in our unit How We Express Ourselves we focused on expressing our ideas and feelings, and how those feeling shape our culture. We do a lot of discussion about feelings in kindergarten, so this unit was perfect for us. My kids loved to dance and move around the room. I loved bringing in songs from when I was in Kenya, as they have such a good beat and are something different. 

We discussed our lines of inquiry which lead to them discussing what differences happen in different cultures for different occasions. We looked at dances from around the world, the past, and the present. Through out student driven inquiry we found pieces such as The Blue Man Group and their favorite, a group that does a dance in light up costumes. 

They decided that they wanted to create a song and dance celebrating that they have learned to read and are learning digraphs (not even recommended by me!) We created our inquiry cycle and decided how we would start this project. We had already done a bulk of our research and next was on to our planning and investigating stages. figured out who had which role and what jobs had to be done, we investigated different instruments and what sounds they would make. They decided that the sound of the instrument had to match the digraph sound. CH sound being kind of tough could be louder, but SH was a quiet sound so had to be something simple like the triangle. It was amazing to see them do all of this planning, the only thing I assisted with was moderating the discussions and making sure everyone got their points across.

We then came up with a rubric together. We decided that they had to had a costume that related to the letter sounds (could either be done by pictures or the costume design), that the letters had to be easily visible on their costume, their voice had to be loud enough while singing, and that they had to do their best work and couldn't be off distracting others. I love creating rubrics with the kids, with a little bit of clever questions from the teacher they really love taking ownership and coming up with good goals for themselves.

We had several reflection breaks where we would go back and check in on how everyone was doing, and decided they should have to meet with me every other day to check in on their progress. They had the room set up in areas where they could work; a singing area, a music area, a costume design area, and others that would be a day or two. 

After all their hard work and practice the kids did an amazing job of putting the show together, they made posters and lyrics, costumes, hand signals, and even their own way of writing and recording when to play each instrument!

We decided that we would then share this video and put it on the blog to share with our friends and family. They were so proud of their work and asked to watch it every day during either lunch or snack.