Storytelling and Other Magical Moments

 The Butterfly Castle or Les Chateau des Papillons The Twins were delighted to have the light table glowing when they returned to the EAL classroom after the holidays. They noticed a new setup and a few new jars of loose parts. They worked together in English, French and Russian creating, Les Chateau des Papillons.  "We can do the castle in English and in French! Only the beautiful things can live there. Not ninjas because they may break the wings. Ladybugs and princesses are okay." A and F Inspired by the concept of a butterfly castle I asked my other EAL groups what a butterfly castle might look like, without showing them the light table. I asked them what a butterfly may need to live in the castle and who they could share the castle with.  These are their illustrations and ideas.

Imagining Dialogue: Inspired by a walk in the snow. Light Table Stories: Creating beautiful moments with language and play Design Thinking: Creating possibilities to design, test, change and play  

This year I decided to link the creation of personal story boxes to our Unit of Inquiry, Where We Are in Place and Time.  Here is the story of our stories.

A materials exploration that leads to  student inquiries, evolving experts, magical moments and beautiful art.

As we inquire into systems of organization in kindergarten we joined with our Primary Arts Specialist to look at how and why we can organize through art.  We thought about why artists make decisions about art, color, line and why they make decisions about their art. They created collaborative art pieces during their time with her and during this time she also introduced the book, Tidying Up Art , Ursus Werli. This made me think about out our collabroative EAL Story/Art, The House with Thirteen Stories.  (See blog post) I asked my students to go back to and look at our story, that was still hanging on the wall. I asked... How can we tidy up our art? Each child took their own personal "story" and cut each piece of their story. In my different EAL group lessons we began organizing the cut objects into categories.  Numbers. Windows. People. Stairs. Animals. Big Things. Things Inside the Home.  Snowflakes. etc... We cut and glued. Organized, ...

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, b...

A detailed pencil drawing by one student left all students (and some teachers) interested in the perspective and the ideas involved in this one page (of a 4 page story) about the deep sea. I enlarged the picture for my three different groups. We added speech to the sharks, story details and added color through paint to tell three the different stories.  Collaboration was seen negotiating with paint colors  and also when deciding the ideas throughout the stories.

Discussions in our unit, Sharing the Planet , took a turn into the deep, dark, sea.  Below are short stories created about deep sea animals and other interests the children found as we inquired into the Abyss.     Just learned how to use this today - Adobe Spark Video. Simple and sweet. Still working on quality control, but can produce something nice in a very short time with young children.

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...

As my team of teachers planned this past school year we often used In Pictures and In Words , by Katie Wod Ray, to look for new illustration techniques and also to focus in on where our students were and think about what we could do next.  Below are some of the most valuable technique and tools used to provide different focus on illustrations this year. Details of Expression and Feelings Details of People (See other blog post) Details of Characters Using Favorite Characters  Details of Characters Using Favorite Pop Culture Details of Weather Details of Time, Light, Day, Seasons Details using different tools (Black fine tipped pen, crayons, marker, water colors) Details to show Motion and Sound  Designing Placment of Words and Pictures Using Size of Words to Convey Mearning Designing Print to Convey Meaning and for Visual Effect Designing a Cover Zooming on a Specific Detail (Animals) Using Borders, Boxes, Charts, Graphs, Maps and other Graphic Features U...