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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Kids LOVE David!

I had a feeling the kids would love David. But I didn't know they would LOOOOVE David even in French. David is bad ... and he's always up to no good.



We read "David va à l'école" at the carpet, sandwiching the French words with English and inferring from the pictures what David was up to. The kids were glued to the story, hanging onto every page. After we read the story, I introduced our 'craftivity'... I prepared (brown) circles for the head and the ears, black circles for the eyes, a black mouth and white triangles for the teeth. I showed students a model and asked for a raise of hands of who would like to make their very own David ... no surprise, everyone raised their hand.


This is what they looked like:

This was my 'model' to show them what the final product looked like ...

 

And this is what you get when you don't direct them to do it the 'right' way ... heehee. So cute.

 

On the second day, we re-read David and talked about the bad things that David did at school (chewed gum, butted in line, painted on his friends, etc ...) and I modelled how to draw a picture of David at school, using think aloud strategies. For example, "Hmm, David is not being very good at school. We read that he was standing on the desk. If I wanted to draw a picture of David at school, I would want to draw him standing on top of a desk." Then I asked them if they were going to draw a picture of themselves at school, would they draw themselves standing on the desk? NOOOO, of course not! I asked them to raise their hands and share what kinds of things they were doing at school. Then I modelled some of their examples. I prepared a worksheet from Mille Merveilles (Click here for link) and asked students to join me at the writing centre to draw self-portraits of themselves at school.

 

 

 

The result: diagnostic assessments on who could print their name, who could recognize letters in their name, who could hold a pencil properly ... and some cute selfies!

 

I had the JKs do the drawing only, while the SKs were asked to trace their name (I wrote them in yellow marker), and cut and glue the letters in their name in the proper order (I wrote out the letters).

 

I have die-cut frames that I'm going to attach their 'selfies' to, and it's going to be a cute display for the open house/BBQ. Oh, and I'll put up the David crafitivities too ... I can't resist.

 

TTFN,

 

 

 

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