My last blog post was on the extensive, thorough, and thoughtful curricular plans which I then completely disregarded.
But what did I teach instead?
Poetry. And Weather. Yes.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I changed my plans in response to what the rest of the Kindergarten grade group was planning at the time I would be teaching. And frankly, I got really excited about a unit on weather and poetry (I was also doing shapes for math, but that was less exciting to me). My first idea, upon considering the topics, was to focus on observation -- leading up to spending time outside, "observing like a scientist" and "observing like a poet."
And, because I was the teacher, I went ahead and did it.
Along the way, we did lots of other things. We made wind gauges, and a cloud in a jar, and a big phony thermometer. We wrote poems about nature, emotions, and ourselves. We read lots of poems and books, we made cotton ball clouds and cut paper collages, and we got to spend time outside on several days. It was pretty great.
Not that it all went perfectly. My first couple days were a bit of an adjustment for everybody; while the kids were pretty familiar with my presence, there was definitely some testing going on, and management was a bit more of a challenge on the first two days than later in the weeks. My first Friday started out as a challenge as well -- I got a great idea to add to a planned lesson in the morning, which I made the mistake of tacking on without thoroughly planning it, and as a result we spent too much time sitting in the morning and the students got antsy.
I certainly felt like I'd recovered by mid-day, but I made the resolution to be even more prepared for the second week, and I feel quite proud of some of the lessons I taught. In perhaps my favorite, I took a book that deals with emotions (When Sophie Gets Angry -- Really, Really Angry, by Molly Bang), and connected it to a previous lesson on similes; we used the symbolic images from the book to construct similes for how Sophie was feeling ("Her anger is like...a volcano/a big, red monster/a breath of flame," etc.), and noticed the ways the author used imagery to share emotions (e.g. the images are outlined in red when Sophie is angry, blue when she is sad, etc.). Finally, we began generating similes for emotions as a class, and finally students independently generated their own emotion similes.
---
Perhaps the coolest part of it all was the way in which one of my students -- the girl with the lowest reading skills in the class, who often struggles with motivation -- revealed herself to have an innate talent for meter and rhyme. It happened like this:
I began my poetry lessons by sharing a bunch of children's poetry; modeling my own poetry-writing; and finally doing a shared writing together with my students. My intent was that nothing would be too "good" -- I wanted students to get the message that poetry was something that anybody could write, and that they didn't need any specific skills, they just needed something they wanted to say.
For our shared writing, the kids decided collectively that they wanted to write about birds. Getting ideas from a few students, we ended up with a title and first line:
But what did I teach instead?
Poetry. And Weather. Yes.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I changed my plans in response to what the rest of the Kindergarten grade group was planning at the time I would be teaching. And frankly, I got really excited about a unit on weather and poetry (I was also doing shapes for math, but that was less exciting to me). My first idea, upon considering the topics, was to focus on observation -- leading up to spending time outside, "observing like a scientist" and "observing like a poet."
And, because I was the teacher, I went ahead and did it.
Along the way, we did lots of other things. We made wind gauges, and a cloud in a jar, and a big phony thermometer. We wrote poems about nature, emotions, and ourselves. We read lots of poems and books, we made cotton ball clouds and cut paper collages, and we got to spend time outside on several days. It was pretty great.
Not that it all went perfectly. My first couple days were a bit of an adjustment for everybody; while the kids were pretty familiar with my presence, there was definitely some testing going on, and management was a bit more of a challenge on the first two days than later in the weeks. My first Friday started out as a challenge as well -- I got a great idea to add to a planned lesson in the morning, which I made the mistake of tacking on without thoroughly planning it, and as a result we spent too much time sitting in the morning and the students got antsy.
I certainly felt like I'd recovered by mid-day, but I made the resolution to be even more prepared for the second week, and I feel quite proud of some of the lessons I taught. In perhaps my favorite, I took a book that deals with emotions (When Sophie Gets Angry -- Really, Really Angry, by Molly Bang), and connected it to a previous lesson on similes; we used the symbolic images from the book to construct similes for how Sophie was feeling ("Her anger is like...a volcano/a big, red monster/a breath of flame," etc.), and noticed the ways the author used imagery to share emotions (e.g. the images are outlined in red when Sophie is angry, blue when she is sad, etc.). Finally, we began generating similes for emotions as a class, and finally students independently generated their own emotion similes.
---
Perhaps the coolest part of it all was the way in which one of my students -- the girl with the lowest reading skills in the class, who often struggles with motivation -- revealed herself to have an innate talent for meter and rhyme. It happened like this:
I began my poetry lessons by sharing a bunch of children's poetry; modeling my own poetry-writing; and finally doing a shared writing together with my students. My intent was that nothing would be too "good" -- I wanted students to get the message that poetry was something that anybody could write, and that they didn't need any specific skills, they just needed something they wanted to say.
For our shared writing, the kids decided collectively that they wanted to write about birds. Getting ideas from a few students, we ended up with a title and first line:
Immediately, the aforementioned girl shoots her hand up. "What do you want to add?" I ask her. Finger on her chin, she recites:Birds of All KindsFalcons, sparrows, robins too...
Falcons, sparrows, robins tooThis absolute nailing of catalectic trochaic tetrameter (seriously) wasn't a one-time thing -- here was the very first thing that she wrote independently (with spelling corrected by me):
What comes next? It might be you!
I thought that was pretty awesome. I'll share one more favorite poem, before signing off for the night:Birds ComingBirds are coming to play with me
Come birds, come birds, what do you see?
My SisterMy sister yells,
Open the door!
The door
Was already
Open.
No comments:
Post a Comment