We Are Alike, We Are Different

At the beginning of the year, while I was waiting to see what interests started popping up for Inquiries, we spent time getting to know each other and building our community!  Of course, we read books to get us thinking.  Here is one the kids loved that talked about how our facial features are different. 

I passed out mirrors and the kids all looked closely at themselves. We discussed how our faces had different shapes. Our eyes had a color, but also a shape! Same with our noses! 

We all made a blackline sketch of our faces to show how we saw ourselves in the mirror.

The next day, we had a discussion about what practice means. They did a beautiful job for a first try, but if they did it again, do they think they would do better, worse, or the same?  They all felt they would do better!  We discussed that practice helps us get better!  So we tried again and they felt that their second try was even better than the first.

The next day we read The Color of Us. It is one of my favorites! The names used to describe the different colors of people are beautiful!

During our exploration time, the kids took turns matching water color paint to their skin tone and painting the skin on their second self portrait. During this process, they learned how to paint with watercolor by rubbing the brush against the side to get rid of the drips and taking care of our water colors by washing their brush after each color. After it dried, they painted their eyes, mouth and hair. 

I always love these self portraits!  They dictated to us what their biggest goal was for them to be able to do be the end of Kindergarten and we wrote their goal on their self portrait. Here are some of their goals:

"I want to learn how to grow big muscles."

"I want to learn how to write my name correctly."

Here is one of my favorites:

Here is the display of their work:

Next, they want to create a friendship painting using their handprints inspired by one my kids made last year that is dislayed in the hallway! I can't wait to see how they make it their own!