KP

Some children wanted to go and explore the snow. Some children wanted to stay inside. Kinder Pris the snow was as cold as the ice in your drinks!

Ms Bridgewater has been working with the children using nonstandard musical notation to record their compositions. Music is one of the languages of expression, which we are exploring in our unit of inquiry. You can see the children’s annotation for this poem in their portfolio.

Here is the audio of their poem. Note from Ms Bridgewater some children elected to have a peer read the poem as they played. The names below are the children playing their compositions.

Morris Ryan

Max Chae Yoon

Kyle Kyoka

Miel Jessica

Tom Sammy

Mari Hwaji

A group of girls laminated the covers for the books by themselves. I have seldom seen such organisational skills and cooperation amongst children this age. This video  shows the children taking action from the unit of inquiry about how we organise ourselves.

The boys decided it was time to clean up ‘the big mess’ and had to work out how to get all the rubbish in our bins. All this going on at the same time.

We are writing our story with Kinder Pris in Borneo. The children have decided to use the following tools to help them, Skype, the class blog, Twitter, video, photographs and a Google doc.We have decided to set the story in a grave yard. Both classes have access to a grave yard. We have both been on field trips.

Kinder Pris field trip to the grave yard.

Kyoka made a photopeach of our field trip.

The children were inspired by the filed trip. Here are their ideas.

Words about grave yards and what we saw.
Graves, black staring cats, banana tree, rocks, dead people under the ground, money, umbrella, blue small bag, broken statue, cars, pyramid, white money, flowers, QR codes, sticks.

Inspirational ideas
Books made of stone
Flowers make things beautiful.
Black staring fears cat
Words on the cross
Stones that are magical
Magical talking trees
Magical sticks that talk
Statues that walk and fly
Drains turn into warriors and there are smells from them
There is a Dutch pyramid that looks like a castle
Broken old grave stone from an earthquake
Umbrella that someone lost or dropped the mischievous monkey makes a prank
Money and chocolate for the monkey
Magic coins and buttons that flew off and gives you wishes.
Pyramid hill for mice.
Banana tree can be be a jewel.

Here is our video for Kinder Pris.

This is the children’s second Taiko session with the ICJC.

Why are we going on a field trip?

Morris: All the peoples in the other place we are writing the story with them. So we need to see a grave yard and they do. It’s the place [setting] for our story.

I talked about authors getting inspiration from real places.

I wanted to know see what prior knowledge the children had about grave yards. I was amazed by their wealth of knowledge and how they had processed the information.

Miel: They sometimes have a fence.

Jessica: They can be big.

Kyle:Grave yards don’t have to be in a church. They can be humungous-but in America no fire.Not in mine. It can be rain.

Max: There are candles and pray and blow it and it makes you have more energy. We did it for old grandpa.

Chae Yoon: Korea look like squares.

Hwaji/Mari: You can put a rectangle rock there [tombstone] you put a short stick [incense] and fire-put water on the rock and pray

Kyoka: On the stones they have letters.

Morris: When people die they put them in a box and put them in a big hole.

Sammy: When someone dies they put a rock on top of them. They are in a box and they put a flower on top. You water it, you pray.

Tom: In Japan I saw a banana flower going down the hill outside the grave yard.

Ryan: I just watched the died people were in the movie. They were in the grave yard.

Words the children thought of to describe a grave yard before the visit.

Pray, box,pets,cats, rocks,stones,water,sticks, dogs,trees, fire,birds,small, cerment, flowers, die people, gate, boats, humungous, words, names.

The children took lots of pictures at the grave yard. It has given them inspiration. Kyoka edited the photo’s and picked the music.

The children have been involved in a ceramics unit with Mr Welkes. Here is a link to the work. we worked closely with Richard making links with our Unit of Inquiry, “We use a variety of languages to communicate their ideas and feelings”

Ceramics in Kindergarten

We were approached by a class in Borneo Kinder Pris to write a story together. This integrates with our Language Arts focus on narrative fiction and our Unit of Inquiry,  different ways to communicate ideas and feelings. We knew a little about the class as they are one of our tweet buddies. We have seen their blog and made gifts for them.

So if they are Borneo and we are in Yokohama how can we write a story together?

KP problem solvers ideas

• We could make a book and write. Leave pages at the end for them and send it to them.

This will take too long. The cards from Kingfisher class took a long time.

• Do they speak English? Maybe they can write in their language and we can write in English. Like our book we made [The children made a class book and Ms. Yuri translated it, just like the bilingual books we had read].

We could Skype them and check their blog. Their blog is in English. We want to Skype them. we love Skype.  We Skyped them, they can speak English.

• We could tweet them, tweety , tweet, tweet. We can write the story and they can write the story.

Yes, but there isn’t enough words for a story. It was good when we got people to give us words [the children tweeted for advice on other words for fast]

• We can write on the computer and send it.

How does it work? How does it get there?

Ms Zoe’s suggestion, teachers at school  use a  Google docs and people can write on it at the same time. Do you think this is a tool that would help you?

Yes we would like to try this. We want to type.

We Skyped Kinderpris. We wanted to share the story ideas we have on our wall.

• Kinder Pris said get the paper and put it to the camera.

We came up with more ideas after talking to them.

• We could take a picture and add it to the blog.

Maybe it is too big, if you move back and take a photo you maybe can’t see it.

We could video it and put it on the blog.

Yes, we will try this.

• We will tweet it like for the good words that tell you so you can see it in your mind [descriptive words].

Yes, we want to try this.

** There as an absolute classic You Tube moment captured by Jesssica  at the beginning of the video. Thank you Miel for letting us share this.***

We have a new  iTouch in our class (Thanks to funding from our  PTSA). The children have explored the video function. They have reflected on their work and have shared their video recording tips on the movie.