The House With 13 Stories

In a discussion about where we live and who we live with, my students decided to use the language of numbers, something they already knew a bit about, to have a silly conversation. We drew our homes and families, created homes with loose parts, described them, what we had in them and talked about the differences between homes and apartments.

A Family 
A House

An Apartment

 How many families live there?
How many people live in
your home? 
 Do you have neighbors?
How do you get to your home?
What floor do you live on, what number?

"100, I do"  declared, Kseniia

"No, no 1million, soooo tall!" yelled Gennady

"Five MILLION!! We see the plane and clouds. "lLaughed Alex

We laughed together and I showed my surprise and I asked:

"How long does the elevator take? How many stairs are there? If you walk up and down how will you feel? What can you see out your window?"

We acted out walking up the stairs panting, breathing, moaning, breathing, then falling to the floor in exhaustion at the top. And from this short conversation came...

The House with Thirteen Stories





You can see floor 10 is a skinny floor. It was accidental. So we talked about what small things would fit. They chooses spiders. All added to the story of the spiders on the 10th floor. 

The pictures above depict a 5 day process of each child adding a floor to the house. Each floor has a different story. The stories eventually were stretched across 5 pages of illustrations to create books. Fantastic oral language and story telling opportunities happened, especially, when we went to the mini books. The stories developed, unlike I had thought from the original drawings. Taking time with each student took time, but it was worth it!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Magic of Magic

Image
The magic blue jewel.  I decided to take a deeper look in to MAGIC and what it means for language development, storytelling and imaginary play in kindergarten.  The WORD Magic has come up over and over this school year and has allowed for wonderful authentic storytelling opportunties.  I wanted to listen to the conversations about magic and figure out what it meant to say MAGIC so often.  Below are some images of magic that came through during play and storytelling experiences. The magic blue fire is stronger than the orange fire in this volcano. This is a magic car. It can go SUPER FAST! Trying to get the ball to roll to the magic yellow mountain. The magic key was found under a hut in the blocks area. The magic rainbow forest. What I realized... Magic fueled their imagination. It created a world that they would love to be a part of. It brought chaos. It brought crazy. It brought laughter, noise and fun when playing and telling st...
Read more

Illustrations (People)

Image
Throughout the school year I find it so important to reflect on my practices and read more about teaching writing to young leaners. There is quite a bit of information available and finding the most inspring, fun and developmentally appropriate way of teaching writing is a goal of mine each year. I try new things, look at each group of students through a new (open minded and optimistic) lens and collaboratively with my team try to make our writing lessons the best they can be. This year my team and I decided to focus on oral storytelling first, as writer's workshop sessions and then focus on illustrations and finally "writing" within the first two months of school. (Although this would look different for each child). This is the beginning of the graphic organizer we used to begin our storytelling workshops. As you can see from my other blog posts, storytelling is a high priority in my lessons. Opportunities to develop language structures and vocabulary an...
Read more