Important People & Me
What Does it Mean to be Important?
As we head into our next unit of study, we took time to think about the word important. In this unit, we focus on qualities of character, and make connections to leaders in our world and ourselves! The intentional timing of this unit allowed us to make connections to the ideas of Martin Luther King Junior as we focused on putting his ideas and dreams into practice in Kindergarten.
Utilizing our January issue of Scholastic's Let's Find Out as a starting point, children had the opportunity to consider and reflect qualities of their own character through this special project.
Vocabulary development, creative expression, and authentic navigation of technology were at the heart of this experience.
Children had the opportunity to work independently on the Chromebooks in order to share ideas about their personal character traits. Working in Google Slides, they took a photo of themselves and inserted it into the background. Using the Word Art feature, along with the Let's Find Out Scholastic issue as a resource, they selected words to type. They then used a variety of design tools such as the paint can, font selection, borders, and shortcuts to manipulate the size of the text.
Final projects were shared with families via digital portfolios in order to further important conversation at home.
Who are These Important People?
As Presidents' Day approached, we embraced the opportunity to learn about past and present leaders of our country. As part of our study, we looked at presidential silhouettes. Children then worked in a small group center to discover what they know about the silhouettes of their classmates. They looked at the darkened silhouette, made a guess about their classmate, checked the full color photo, then practiced recording the name of that person with proper letter formation and capitalization.
I Can Be President Too!
Following the center experience, the Kindergartners got together to enjoy the book, I Can Be President Too! by Yanitzia Canetti. We identified qualities of a strong leader and made connections to the ways in which we can demonstrate these qualities each day. For our culminating experience, each Kindergartner recorded a special quality about him or herself as part of this special Kindergarten video inspired by the book.
The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever being able to do it.
-J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan