Community Builders 9/10-9/14

As this week progressed, we noticed the children working together, sharing with each other, and caring about their classmates, exhibiting all the values we hope to nurture in our classroom community. 
One of our favorite ways of building a community is "story acting." During Discovery Time, several children might dictate stories to one of the teachers. These stories are then read to the class during our Reflection Meeting.  Each child has an opportunity to act out the roles or characters from the stories.  In this way, the entire class becomes part of an individual's story and helps build a sharing community. Below, Ms. Leigh reads HT's story while HT and WJ act it out.

One day, we sat with SC and talked to her about some of the memories in her journal. At our Reflection Meeting, we had her share her favorite pages with the class. Included on these pages were pictures from Cars and The Little Mermaid. As the children looked at the pages, they began to notice similarities in interests and experiences, again helping build community. As SC shared that she enjoys watching movies, JB yelled out, "I saw Ka Chow, Cars. I like that!," while JM said, "I have Arial; that's my favorite, too!" 

As KP, NW, ZI, and DG "made" music, LS, SC, RM, HT, and Ms. Leigh danced to the beat. We explored fast, slow, happy, sad, and angry sounds and dance movements. The children shared the different drums and chimes as well as Ms. Leigh's hands to hold!  We were community-building while exploring a different language to express ourselves!

Ms. Jordan has been working with the children to draw their self-portraits. As she encourages each child to carefully observe their facial features, the children create their first "official" drawing of themselves! (A portrait is drawn every year and kept in the child's portfolio through the fifth grade.)  Although this was an individual project, some of the children who had finished wanted to stay and "help" the next child, making the project a group experience.

We also are building our relationship with the four-year-old class. Our first "Water Fun Day" was filled with bubbles, squirt bottles filled with water and paint, and lots and lots of water. New friendships were made between both classes as the children created a squirt-bottle painting and chased after bubbles.

Our Mid-Pacific community grew a little bigger as an 8th grade class put on a puppet show for the preschool and Ms. Hitomi's kindergarten class. The middle school students wrote the skits and made the puppets for the performance. Our three-year-olds came back with yet another language in which to express themselves!

Another community-building exercise was with the parents! We put three photographs on clipboards and asked for parents' thoughts about what was happening in them. Although we received few comments, we know parents had a taste of what we do daily. We'll be elaborating on the photos if they develop into deeper learning discoveries.

Finally, our community extended to the entire school at our BBQ on Saturday. It was a rainy day, yet many families came to socialize (some after seeing the Thunderbirds). We are off to a wonderful start on our journey!

Reminder:

Friday, October 5:  Aloun Farms field trip

Posted at 12:20 PM| Permalink

An Encounter of the Mind and Hand: Painting

During the first week of school, we introduced painting on an easel with tempera paint to support peer-to-peer relationships and begin building our community of learners. To encourage and foster this experience, we placed two easels side-by-side as a means of encouraging the children to look at each other's work and talk or begin a dialogue with each other about what each was painting. We also intended for this experience to open the possibility for each child to learn from and about the other.



We purposely chose four colors for the children to explore- red, yellow, blue and white- hoping that the children would discover the new colors they could make when the colors were mixed. We selected the thick consistency of the tempera so that the children might discover the various textures they could create with the paint brush or with their hands.

In reflecting upon the context of this experience, we realized that, much like the first marks on paper with a pen, this experience was an extension of their journey of writing! As a child becomes a maker of artistic symbols or representations using lines and shapes, he/she begins to realize that the marks on paper is an extension of their thoughts made visible. The visual symbols not only are the beginning of writing/reading symbols, but also the development of a child's ability to plan and think. With each additional experience using paint, they learn to control their movements and decide which lines should be long or short, straight or wavy, thick or thin, which color to select and where on the paper to place the paint.  The simple marks become more controlled, reflecting their growing awareness of the nature of the material and their own creative expression much like a pencil or marker on a paper.


Our Observations: The emergence of an artistic community
As Ms. Jordan encouraged the children who were painting to observe the changes in texture and colors, she noticed that instead of choosing another area to discover while they waited, the children who wanted to paint gathered around the easels. As this experience unfolded, the children's enthusiasm for painting became contagious. The easel area became not only a place to explore painting, but also a tool for building our community! As excited as they were, we found that the children were building relationships with each other and  building a relationship with a new medium- paint.                                   

Posted at 12:42 PM| Permalink