All the colors we are

A big part of our social studies curriculum in kindergarten is learning about who we are as individuals and members of a community. All year long we will do different activities that help us explore how each person is unique. Here are some glimpses into what we have done in the past few weeks!

We started off by reading the book I Love My Hair and exploring our hair color, length and texture. We did a writing activity sharing why we love our hair.

Next we started a discussion about our skin color using the books Shades of People and All the Colors We Are. The books taught us that while skin is often called "black" or "white," we are actually all various shades of brown. We read and talked about how our skin pigment comes from the amount of melanin we were born with, as well as who are biological parents and ancestors are.

We looked at paint chip samples in all shades of brown, and picked out ones that were closest to our skin shade. Then we made self portraits using our skin color's name (such as tan, cocoa, etc).

Several of our explore tables helped the kids further investigate these concepts, including playing a game called "I Never Forget a Face" and using art materials to create models of ourselves and our family members.

Our culminating project was writing poems about ourselves and using skin color paper to represent our hands. We shared these with the whole school at this month's all-school assembly, and then put them on display at Black History Night at the Salvation Army! They're now hanging outside our classroom if you'd like to come get a closer look. I love how they turned out!

More about pushes & pulls

We finished up our science unit on Pushes & Pulls this week. The kids loved it and were sad that it was over! After investigating the question "What makes things move?" we moved onto to studying how to make things move in certain ways. For example, we studied what happens when you put an object in the way of a moving ball, and what happens when you roll one ball towards another one. Our culminating project was to discuss and map out the best way to move a large ball cart from one end of the school to the other. The kids were really invested in designing a solution to the challenge and used all their knowledge of pushes and pulls to execute a perfect plan!

Investigating how to make balls move in certain ways

Drawing models of what happened

Making our map to answer the question "How can we use pushes and pulls to make a path for the ball cart?"

Executing our plan using the map we designed

Making our own models of the plan

100th Day, goodbye to a friend, and Read Your Heart Out

Friday was a big day at school! It was the 100th day of school (which was rescheduled multiple times due to all our snow days!), Read Your Heart Out, and a goodbye party for one of our dear classmates. We also had an all-school assembly to celebrate Black History Month which I will post about soon. Thanks to all our guest readers who came for Read Your Heart Out on African American community involvement day. Below are some pictures of the fun!

Making 100 day hats and 100 day trail mix

Our guest readers who came as part of African American community involvement day!