Last Friday, we hosted a mini-exhibition for our parents so they could view some of the self-portrait work we've been doing as part of our inquiry into how 'Who we are is shaped by the people around us'. We were so excited to share our pieces, as well as some other works of art and different projects around our classroom. Thanks to everyone who joined us! Here are our reflections from the event which we completed this week:
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There are many ways of making meaning and representing thinking, and oral language is one of them. Through our Philosophy for Children sessions, children gain confidence and skills in expressing themselves through oral language, also developing their capacities as respectful listeners. After creating watercolour portraits of our families last week, we sat in a circle to discuss the following question: Why do you think families are important? As with all of our philosophy sessions, we lit a candle in the middle of our circle to help us concentrate and be peaceful. As part of our 'Who We Are' unit of inquiry, we have been exploring who we each are as individuals through the line of inquiry 'Who I Am'. Since the beginning of the year, we have been investigating our physical features, likes, dislikes, and favourite things and activities and have worked on representing these in different ways. Recently we have been making connections between our unique selves and the people around us, including friends and family. We practiced sketching what we saw with pencil and charcoal. We spent many days continuing to study, describe, and discuss the features of our faces. We found similarities and differences between our physical features and learned new words to describe ourselves. We then represented this knowledge in a different way, using the digital tool Make a Face from ABCYa! Next we spent time exploring and representing our whole bodies, experimenting with clay and clay tools as "languages" for self-expression. For several weeks, we used our varieties of self-portraits as provocations for self-description and analysis. We used the physical pieces to explore more conceptual understandings, like individuality and personal preference. Finally, we worked on combining the information and ideas we had explored through self-portraits in one final piece: a whole body representation. One morning we took turns tracing our bodies on big pieces of white paper. These tracings became canvases for us to document what we now knew about our physical features, personal preferences, and connections to family. Our collage approach demonstrated the interconnection between these things and how all these aspects combine together to make us 'Who We Are'. As our unit of inquiry continues, we have also continued to add to our whole body representations, always deepening and extending our understandings of 'Who We Are' and how the people around us play a role in shaping this.
On Friday we participated in our very first Sports Day! It was a hot, hot day, but we braved the heat and had lots of fun running in a race and playing the games in our activity rotations. Thanks to all the families who came out to support us!
After we had collected all of the love hearts and peace signs, we brought them back to our classroom. We started to talk about how some of them were the same and some were different. First we sorted them into 2 groups: hearts and peace signs. Then we noticed that these symbols were different colours, so we sorted them into 4 groups: pink hearts; red hearts; peace signs with green, blue, pink and purple; and peace signs with yellow, pink, blue, and orange. We are becoming very good sorters!
For the last two weeks our Star Name has been Mana. We learned more about Mana through our Star Name interview. We have explored the letters in her name, learning their sounds and formations. We played with this knowledge in different ways, including forming letters with play dough, writing the letters with chalk and acting out the sounds. As we become more familiar with our friends' names we are becoming more and more excited about writing and more confident with letter and sound identification. |
About Us
We are a group of Kindergarten 1 students at an IB World School in Singapore. Our teacher is Miss Alison. Follow us on our blog and Twitter to see how much we're learning and growing! More Blogs to Follow at ISS:Archives
June 2015
Elementary Principal (Mr. Pinchbeck)
ISS Phys Ed (Mr. Nathan) ISS Art Factory (Ms. Caz) ISS Music (Ms. Stacey) ISS Mandarin (Ms. Linda) Categories
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