Kindergarten 2

“Places tell stories, and these stories are adventures one must explore. Nature, the people, and the smell of a new land screams adventure. The world is humongous, and a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to explore it.” A story always starts with a blank canvas -- an empty space of many possibilities. It comes to life when the storyteller fills it with wondrous worlds or foreign lands where the characters move and tell their narrative. It is a principal element of a story, one where the reader can escape to and take unprecedented adventures that only happen in one's imagination.  This week, the kindergarteners learned about the setting of a story, and how it shapes the characters that move around it. We started off with a quick brainstorm of what a story is. It's the perfect way to know what the children understand at this point to help drive the rest of the inquiry.  These are what they said: We read stories. Stories can be found in books. Stories have letters and words. Stories ha...

"Everything is sacred when you take time to notice. Big love happens in the small moments." -JJ Heller Our life is made up of tiny moments. They are small but significant pockets of time that when put together, make our life story more meaningful. It can be found in many of our firsts, lasts, and in betweens -- like the first time we experienced snow, or the last time we saw our beloved pet, or the slow and quiet walks where we can savor the beauty around us. In writing, tiny moments are the strongest foundations of a story. Lucy Calkins, an advocate of literacy and the Writing Workshop approach, calls them seed stories. When children write, they often look at the broader picture. Seed stories ask us to zoom in -- to look at the tiny details of the bigger picture, and to let it grow with our words. This way, we create a vivid retelling of our stories that will allow our readers to experience it as if they were with us when it was happening. Source This week in Kinder 2 was ab...