Who Are We?

Hello Kindergarten families!

Since coming back from our Winter Break, we have been working on our characters who attended the party in our Spooky Story that we wrote on Halloween.  After identifying them all, we were noticing that we still didn't know WHO was at the party... so the class decided to give more information about their character.  We are bringing our characters to life!  

This is an interesting concept for many of the friends; we have established some key points that each child will share about their character:

• Give your character a name
• Describe their appearance (what they look like, what their costume is)
• Describe their favorite things
• Explain who their friends are
• Explain where they live

Each student will be working on giving their character their own identity, which got us thinking about who we are... WHO ARE WE?  We started making lists of words that describe who we are, what we do in class, and any thing else that would help give people more information about us. 

But our list was so long, we started eliminating words that not everyone agreed with, and started voting for the words that we wished for the most.

After every vote, we had fewer and fewer words to chose from...

Until we finally came down to the final words--- still eliminating those that students felt were not necessary to have because people already knew we were kindergartners  humans, school people, loving, and playful.  We wanted to give people information about us that they did not already know.

After looking at the results, we combined the two most wished for words and did one last vote to see what our official class name would be!  From now on, you'll be hearing me call out to the kids by their name:  Artistic Scientists!  Very appropriate, if you ask me.

In other news, we have been practicing our number sense by coming up with ideas about what there is only ONE of in our life.  Here are a few examples of student work:

"sun"

"stomach"

"Planned Possibilities Binder"

"moon"

"sky"

"sun"

"mouth"

Friends have also been asked to think about letters and what words start with a specific letter.  We are starting off with the letter A and it is neat to see what some friends have come up with by looking through different dictionaries and other sources in our class!

"armadillo"

"Avani"

"Andrew"

Also, last week, our friend Lyla brought in a beautiful Origami crane to our Morning Meeting.  We got a chance to examine the fine folding techniques used and it inspired us to do some more research.  I happen to have a couple of books on Origami in our Art Book section, and we investigated the different creations that one could make out of paper. 

In our afternoon, we watched a "How To..." video, demonstrating how to make and Origami Boat.  We worked in small groups and tried to follow the steps on the video.  Check it out if you'd like to do one together at home!

I'm bummed that I did not take pictures of this moment that we were sharing together, because I was really impressed at how some friends were stepping up to the plate and taking risks, as well as sharing their expertise with friends who felt like they were struggling.  I heard a lot of, "That's ok, we're just practicing right now..."  It was a very proud moment... 

So thank you again for sharing these wonderful children with me.  It is really a lovely experience we are having together...

Love, Gaby