Nursery 1 students created a virtual forest in the classroom for their plastic animals. By placing a photo of a forest on the overhead projector and choosing an audio recording of rain, they used their bodies and plastic animals to create light and shadow and move inside the environment.
"NOTHING WITHOUT JOY" -Loris Malaguzzi
One of our US students in PK9 brought a Super Bowl cake to the classroom to share with his classmates. We took this opportunity to learn a little about American football. We looked at different historical football photographs from the National Geographic webpage and found some recent uploads of the summary of this year’s Super Bowl game on YouTube. The students watched the videos and discussed their experience watching the game. Here is a link to one of the conversations.
For the last two months, K10 has been studying and researching Mo Willems to learn a little about his life and work. We learned that Willems has a daughter named Trixie and that’s why he gave the same name to one of the main characters in his Knuffle Bunny books. This helped children understand that an author can be inspired by personal experiences and use this to create new stories.
Children also noticed that Willems uses real photographs for the settings of his books and then he draws the characters as illustrations. We compared this type of illustration to other Willems’ books and reflected on how, as the illustrator of a book, you can decide the style and technique you want to use.
Children loved the idea of using real photos, so we decided to create a story together using Willems’ style. The class decided they wanted the story to be about the Pigeon becoming a student in K10. We titled the book “The Pigeon Goes to School.” Each child mentioned a part of the routine they would like Pigeon to do, and we took a photograph of that child doing the chosen activity. Then we printed the photo in black and white, asked each student to draw a picture of Pigeon, and had the child cut and paste the drawing on the photo to make it look like a Knuffle Bunny book.
Children also noticed that Willems uses real photographs for the settings of his books and then he draws the characters as illustrations. We compared this type of illustration to other Willems’ books and reflected on how, as the illustrator of a book, you can decide the style and technique you want to use.
Children loved the idea of using real photos, so we decided to create a story together using Willems’ style. The class decided they wanted the story to be about the Pigeon becoming a student in K10. We titled the book “The Pigeon Goes to School.” Each child mentioned a part of the routine they would like Pigeon to do, and we took a photograph of that child doing the chosen activity. Then we printed the photo in black and white, asked each student to draw a picture of Pigeon, and had the child cut and paste the drawing on the photo to make it look like a Knuffle Bunny book.
Children just finished this part of the process. The next step will be to audio record their voices and turn the book into an ebook using the app Book Creator.
En la clase de español los alumnos de kínder han estado disfrutando de los videos creados por sus compañeros en los que leen sus propias historias y han utilizado la cámara para tomar fotografías de las historias con el objetivo de compartirlas con sus amigos o familiares.