Ways We Celebrate Our Learning: @kkidsinvt

I have been thinking a lot about the importance of having celebrations inside and outside of Kindergarten.  Celebration is easy, fun, seamless and looks and sounds differently from day to day.  As an educator of young children a large role I play with my students is to model “how to” capture what we are exploring, but also the importance of dancing and singing out what we discover.  Through our “shouting out” we are celebrating what we are discovering.  When we share, we make connections and have an opportunity to share our story.  Stories are so important and everyone has many.  In Kindergarten we use a variety of technological tools to tell our stories.

What an amazing week we had in Kindergarten.  My students are really amazing thinkers!  We explored a new App on the iPad, used AirServer to share our understandings, posted on our kidblogs, tweeted connections and collaborated together around finding ways to enhance our understanding of how we know a triangle is a triangle.  We also explored Tellagami!

Exploring Tellagami was really fun.  I am always looking for ways that my students can create and design what they are learning in ways that allows them to share and tell their story.  A Personal Tellagmai I was so amazed and excited to watch and listen to what my students created.  I was surprised at how easily they navigated their way around the iPad and how easy it was for all of my students to come up with an idea about what they wanted to create.  Their ideas were related to ideas we are exploring in Kindergarten as well as personal experiences they have had outside of Kindergarten.

Tellagami In Kindergarten

Celebration is vital and very important when it comes to learning and developing relationships with your students.  Technology really helps capture and enrich the learning experiences that my students are having.  Through their excitement we celebrate and give compliments about what we are creating.

Our leader of the day uses AirServer to connect and remotely access their ideas so that everyone else can see and give their ideas about what they notice.  My students use AirServer daily to share what they are learning!

During the month of November we are exploring 2 and 3 dimensional attributes.  Geoboard is a great App because it gives students the opportunity to explore the different attributes as well as opportunities to justify their thinking. Through their own understanding of specific features, my students begin to create and make connections with what they are exploring.  Some of the conversation went like this:”Look, it is a triangle because it has 3 pointy things and straight sides”, I shaded in all my triangles, triangles can be different sizes, I am going to see how many I can make, I made triangles inside other shapes, I made a tower!” The conversation is exciting, positive and reflective.  My students are all sharing their voice, making connections and justifications about their discoveries as well as sharing how they know their idea to be true.  This is an authentic example of how celebration can look and sound.  I think sometimes that my best celebrations with my students are those that I have not planned!

After we created triangles my students took screen shots of their designs.  Many asked “Mrs. D. Can we put this on our kidblog?”  Yes, of course!  We will work on this next week.  I am amazed at how my students understand that what they create and discover has a special place where it can be shared.  My students really like kidblog because other people leave compliments about their posts.  This is a one of the reasons why I use kidblog.

Looking forward to next week.  I am thinking of ways that we can enhance our learning and share what we are learning about the forest and about what opportunities I can create for my students to share. Technology gives me and my students endless opportunities to share our stories. Through our own stories we become connected and we begin to take risks in regards to learning.