Kindergartens Building Community

As many of you are aware, I love to engage in scholarly activities like writing and publishing about early childhood education issues. I find professional writing helps me engage in active reflection about my practice and I find it very motivating to share what we do and learn in our FDK classroom with others. I'm pleased to share a link to my latest article regarding a rich inquiry our class experienced in May 2015. Donating food to the Downtown Mission last Christmas (2014) was a very big activity in our classroom. Our children were very worried when we shared a newspaper article in May stating the Mission was running low on food. The children were called to action and inspired to find ways to solve this problem. Working together to communicate beyond our classroom and encourage the community to help, we were able to gather over 5000 items for the Mission in a little over a week! I wrote about this experience and the article will appear in ETFO's Voice Magazine in the Winter issue. Here is a link to the online version of the article: http://etfovoice.ca/article/kindergarteners-building-community/

 

 

For those of you interested in learning more, here is a digital documentation iMovie created to share the many artifacts from our inquiry:

 

Kindergartens Building Community One Can at a Time

Families, last year our children experienced the richest inquiry of my career; inspired by an article in the Windsor Star they collected over 5000 food items in just over a week for The Downtown Mission. You can learn more about it by watching our digital documentation video.

We are again collecting non-perishable items in a school wide canned food drive from Monday, November 16 to Friday, December 11. We are hoping to use this collection as inspiration for rich classroom discussion and learning. Please consider helping us with such an important mission.

Digital Documentation

I have organized the documentation from our food drive into a digital documentation 'panel'. Maximize your screen for optimal viewing. Enjoy!

Getting Ready

Today was a very busy day spent getting ready for our trip to The Downtown Mission tomorrow. We want each child to be able to personally deliver a bag of food when we get off the bus, so we spent time decorating bags with pictures and words showing support.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next job was for each child to choose three items to put in their bag. This way when we do our grand count tomorrow we know exactly how many items we've already bagged. This also proved to be a good exercise in math as the children needed to count the items and then try and fit them together in the bag. They had to choose 'just right' sizes in order to make the items all fit.

 

Our final job was organizing the remaining items so that the boxes weren't overloaded and would be easy to transport tomorrow!

 

44 and counting!

Families thank you for your response to our call for help! The children were so excited to count how many food items were donated today. 

We used what we know about numbers to easily count the items that came to school this morning. One child suggested we place the items into groups of ten for easy counting. We quickly calculated that 44 items were donated!

We are keeping track of how many items have been collected in total on a large recording sheet using numbers and ten frames to help us organize our thinking. 

The children helped us bring the food to our big display in the front entrance of the school. 

The children were also eager to make more posters to help share their cause...

...and we announced our project over the p.a. system so the entire school could be informed!