Self-Portraits: Our First In-Person Learning Activity
One of our first activities in Kindergarten was making self-portraits of ourselves. Since we are in a unique time, I decided the self-portraits should reflect that. As seen above, these self-portraits show the students in masks, and then under the masks the students came up with positive traits they think about themselves. We also wrote sentences about physical traits we like about ourselves. As a part of this activity, we presented our work to our classmates as a way to practice self-love and a supportive classroom community. This activity helped our class think about ways we might be the same and different than one another, and gave us the chance to celebrate our differences!
In spring 2021, our Kindergarten team developed a project centering ocean animals, learning about how they communicate their feelings, and about how we can use our learning to communicate our own feelings. This project work is rooted in SEL practices, and helps our students' developing souls recognize and relegate their own feelings. Above highlights a lesson where we co-created an octopus yoga pose. In the video, you can see us practicing breathing with an octopus read aloud. Then we watch a video of an octopus that feels relaxed so we can notice how we should be moving for our yoga move, and make connections with how we act when we feel that way. Finally, we co-create the pose as a class to add to our weekly ocean animal yoga practices. This lesson allows the students to find connections in their own feelings, as well as take agency in their own learning as we co-create the pose. Below shows student work that came from this lesson. After co-creating the pose, we created how-to writing to teach others how they can also practice octopus yoga. From these how-to writings, you can see that the two cohorts (AM and PM) ideated slightly different yoga poses that they thought represented an octopus movement. These how-to writings are displayed in our classroom as we practice and add onto our ocean animal yoga every week.