Building Bridges!

We have wooden blocks. We have foam blocks. We have duplo blocks. We have lego blocks ... Let me tell you, we have blocks!

For the past two and a half months, they've built structures and towers and castles. And, they've destroyed structures and towers and castles. We've taken pictures of their structures when they didn't want to break them during tidy-up and they've tried 'recreating' them ... And we've even let them keep their 'structures' in tact to avoid meltdowns.

Something that they haven't done in the past two and half months is they haven't built BRIDGES!

Last week, I created a book titled, "Est-ce qu'on peut construire?" inspired by Megan Adams at Play to Learn Kindergarten to push the kids out of their comfort zone. After all, isn't that reaaaaalllly what FDK is all about??

Megan explained it as, "a book full of structures ... some from around the world like the London Bridges, some from our country like the Scotiabank Place and some from our community, like our school." Found some pictures on the internet, laminated them, put a ring through it and ... tada! Our 'Can We Build It?' book of structures!

This is a prime example of what 'planting a seed for inquiry' looks like in Kindergarten. I made the book and put it in the block centre and explained it to a few students and it 'took off' all on it's own. Not to mention ... from this book, I found out that students are amazed with the bridges! Why ...  hello, next inquiry.

This is a girl being the 'site manager' ... describing to everyone what to do next.

But wait ... they could use the piece that already looks like a bridge from the train tracks. Duh! Why didn't I think of that?

 

While I was sitting there, playing with the kids, one of the girls asked what the words said. I read, "London Bridges" and she exclaimed, "LIKE THE SONG?" ... Naturally, we then broke out into a sing-song ... 

And, when they compared their bridge to the picture they noticed that they were missing something ... boats! So, they used the trains as boats. Maybe we need to get some boats!

No word of a lie, I turned around to the computer station and this kinder was on abcya.com on a game called, "Build the bridge". Are you kidding me?!

Okay, now that I'm all fired up again and excited about our next inquiry, I'd better get to planning my next steps! Thank goodness it's the weekend!

Any ideas on how to probe their thinking and extend this inquiry?!


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Our first inquiries!

The new FDK program is child-centered, developmentally appropriate and play-based. In our classroom, we focus on ‘inquiry’ … which means, we plan for tomorrow based on what the students are interested in and what their needs are today. This week, we had two really great ‘inquiries’ …

If you’ve ever tried to teach while a fly, a spider or a bee were in your classroom, you’ll understand that students are WAAAAYYYY more interested in insects than anything you have to say. So, we went with it. We trapped two wasps this week, put them into little glass containers, took out some magnifying glasses and set up a ‘science discovery’ table.

We asked questions like, “What do you see with the magnifying glass that you didn’t see before?” … and “What will happen to the wasp if we leave him in the jar? … How do you know?”  In planning for next week, I’m going to ‘revisit’ the wasp inquiry … I’m going to read “Les abeilles"

                                               (Click here for the link to Scholastic)

And we’re going to fill in our anchor chart (using as much French language as possible, sandwiching the two languages) using prior knowledge and our newly learned info from our inquiry and our read-aloud. I’m planning for this “mini-lesson” to take about 5 – 10 minutes … no longer than that. If students aren’t interested in it, we’ll cut it short.

 

I also have a cute ‘craftivity’ for students to complete, inspired by Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching Blog, which will look something like this:

I’ve cut out all the ‘pieces’ and students will be responsible for gluing the pieces together, including the stripes – this should turn out quite interesting! Heehee.

Our second inquiry began in the block area. My teaching partner read “If You Take a Mouse to School” by Laura Numeroff (Click here for a link to this story being read on youtube -  super cute link btw because it’s a child reading it). During centre time, a few of our students were building towers. When I inquired about their towers, one student said, “This is where the mouse lives like in our book.” Ding, ding, ding. Bells went off inside my head. I questioned further, and he went to go get the book. Sure enough, he was doing a fantastic job replicating what he had seen in the book. I asked him if it would help if he kept the book open and tried to ‘copy’ it to challenge himself. So he did.

 

Two of our kinders (one JK, one SK), looking at the book and trying to replicate it.

 

A few other students came by to see what the excitement was about. I encouraged some of the girls to ‘draw’ the mouse house. It seems that we have little architects and contractors in our class … drawing up plans, building according to the plan.

This is a picture that one of our JKs drew of the tower ... there's a little mouse in the picture too (how cute ... and yet, so detailed!)

Our next steps, as teachers … well, it’s time for us to get down and build towers!! Next week we’re going to build some towers, take pictures of our towers and challenge our little contractors to out-build the teacher. We can also use "wonder" questions in the block area to stretch their thinking and we can make connections to what's being done in the block area to other centres (i.e. write about it, draw it, create a playdough model, etc.. )

Have I said how much I love my job?

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