This week we continued to have conversations about our IDENTITY, Who are we, What makes us who we are. A great opening for this discussion was “The Bag about me”; each student filled a bag with four things that he/she liked or loved. As we opened one by one, we discovered that we liked many of the things that were in somebody else’s bag. We could hear: “Hey, I like to play baseball but that is not my bag!”, or “I like graham crackers too, they’re my favorite!”. We could see that while we are different from each other, we also share many of the things we like or dislike. We have so much in common!
In the Welcome Letter I emailed to the students a few weeks ago, I talked about Two Truths and a Lie about myself, and I finally revealed which one was the lie, it was a tricky one! (ask your child if he/she remembers which one was the lie). Students then dictated their own Two Truths and a Lie, and drew it in their journal. Then we shared it with the class so they could guess which one was the Lie. It was fun for everyone to guess it since some students understood quickly that the Lie could be either something silly or tricky. What a great way to get to know each other better! We’ll keep on writing in our journals regularly in class. It’s an inviting way for students to be creative, use their own experiences and share their thoughts, feelings, ideas, memories and connections. It is a step toward further developing emergent writing skills in addition to making text to speech connections. Students get very excited when it is their turn to share their journal with the rest of the class.
While talking about ourselves, we compared each other’s color of skin, eyes, hair, and we discussed how different and unique we are. We also wondered about our feet, how long are our feet and who had longer/shorter feet. At first sight it was easy to guess who had longer feet (teacher! :P) But we really wanted to know who had longer feet among the students and who had smaller feet from all. Before measuring, students estimated the number of unifix cubes they needed for their feet, some say 2, some 20, some a hundred! We then measured using the unifix cubes, counted them and wrote down the information. After gathering all of our data, we created a graph to compare our findings. Creating graphs in prek and kindergarten provides a foundation for more advanced data analysis concepts that will be explored in the later years. We had so much fun measuring our feet!
As we continued to explore our room, we found new toys and new corners that didn’t seem to get our attention before, like puppets or musical instruments. On Monday, we had a special visitor, our friend Taco came to surprise us. Do you know who Taco is? Ask your child about Taco. We’ve also been monitoring our baby fish “Little Bean”, and we could see that he grew bigger in just one week. We noticed that he’s getting more courage as he’s been swimming at a different side of the fish tank. We also noticed that the other fish swim away from him, and that brought so many questions, like Who is the mom? (since all of our fish are females), or What do baby fish eat?, and Who is taking care of him?, Who’s teaching him how to swim? Does he need a diaper? Where does the poop go? So many questions!
One of our classmates made an amazing discovery in his backyard: he found a skull!!! This was a very interesting thing to examine and we used our magnifying glasses to look at its teeth and molars. We concluded that the skull belonged to a small animal, and that brought us to the big mystery: What type of animal does the skull belonged to? We made our predictions and wrote them in our journal; we also made drawings of the animals we’d predicted. Some of us guessed that it belonged to a squirrel, others thought it was a bat, or maybe a baby cheetah!. After thinking and thinking, and thinking some more we thought that we needed to narrow down our options. Now, what type of animals could end up in our back yard? Birds? Squirrels? Elephants? Hippopotamus? We then decided to investigate further to find out the big mystery. We looked for pictures of animals’ skulls and inspected them. We looked for the ones we had predicted first, and we compared the main parts of the skull: the teeth, the nose and eyes. We looked and started eliminating one by one, even the most popular guess and the one that made the more sense: the squirrel. We’ve all seen squirrels in our backyard, but we noticed that squirrels teeth are very remarkable and our skull’s teeth looked nothing like it. Back to square one. We needed to get back to the thinking board and write down our next guesses. One of the students wondered how long the skull was, and another student thought it was a good idea to measure it the same way that we measured our feet. So they grabbed the unifix cubes and measured it, they counted and checked that the skull is 4 unifix cubes! That also means that the head of the animal is smaller than our feet. We’ll continue with our investigation next week. Stay tuned to see what we can find about the mystery animal.
Soraya Castro
