The Poetry Project: A Poetry Cafe Planned By Kindergartners

Every year I introduce my class to poetry and every year they love it! They also love to write it. It gives them a fresh, new reason to write! I start out by immersing them in poetry. The one that always ends up being their favorite is All the Small Poems and Forteen More by Valerie Worth.

This book teaches them that they can look at anything, even the most simple thing like grass, the sky, a rock, or a pencil, and see it so clearly if they look at it with "poet's eyes." They realized that they could write a poem about anything! 

For the next twelve years, they will most likely be told what type of poems they have to write. I just want them to write poems freely without any restrictions. I expose them to list poems, I Like... poems, metaphors, picture poems, haikus, poems with rhythm and poems with rhymes. We talk about how these poems can inspire their own poetry. I love reading their poems and seeing how each child is inspired by different styles of poetry. I also loved reading about the different subjects they would write about. Some were so sad they brought tears to my eyes about real life situations. Some were about happy memories and some were about random things just like Valerie Worth. 

The kids wrote poems for about two weeks and then made their own personal poetry treasuries to take home. They read their poetry books over and over! I asked if they would like to present their poems to our families. That is when the planning for our Poetry Cafe started.  They decided they wanted snacks and drinks and some wanted to make the room "pretty." They voted for sugar cookies for a snack. I volunteered to also bring some popcorn. 

This group has been exploring herbs (which will be another blog post) so we decided to make water with some lemon and our Spearmint plant. 

Cooking with 25 kids by myself was a very interesting experience, (in the past I've always had an assistant) but we got it done! We made the lemon-mint water first. 

The kids love to take pictures of things that they create, but about four kids asked if they could take pictures of the process as we made our cookies and lemon-mint water. Here are some of the moments and things they thought were important through their photos as we made the water. They would even stand on chairs to get a different perspective. They watch me too much! 

We made the cookies next. I usually have the kids make everything homemade but without help and since we were pressed for time, I pushed the easy button and used a mix! I love this sugar cookie mix!! It's my favorite!

Here is the documentation of the process from the kids point of view with their photos.

I pulled out all of my flowers so a group could make arrangements. 

We also made a poetry banner. They wanted to use the colors that were in their favorite painting Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh. 

I hung it up in a prominent spot and used its color inspiration as a backdrop for our "Welcome to our poetry cafe" sign. 

We practiced reading our poems in our books and then set them out on the tables along with the flowers. 

We displayed our lemon-mint water with the recipe and a graph showing who liked the lemon-mint water and who didn't.

We also created a snack table. The kids made labels for everything. They even made signs without me knowing about it saying "Eat Here" and put them on all the tables in our room! I also enjoyed the "Get food here" sign someone made and stuck on the snack table. These are examples of purposeful writing. They write for these reasons without thinking writing is a hard thing. They just do it naturally because they feel it is needed. 

Each friend picked their favorite poem to share for the poetry reading part of our cafe. They had a podium and a microphone, and I put their poem up on the promethium board so the families could see it also as they read it. 

After the reading, the kids took their families to their tables to read their Poetry books and Space books to them. Then they took them around the room open house style to show them all of the space projects they have worked on. After that they got to mingle and enjoy some snacks and drinks together. 

I love doing this each year! It is a great way for us to build community and let the kids show all that they have done! You could see how proud they were to put this on for their families! It was very meaningful and purposeful for them all! That's how the best learning takes place!

Stay tuned for the next blog post where I will blog about our space inquiry!

Mother's Day Gifts

When my son was in Kindergarten, he made this and gave it to me for Mother's Day.  I cried because it was so beautiful and captured his childhood innocence so perfectly! 

I decided then that I wanted every mother or special person in their lives to feel the same joy I felt when I opened that precious gift! 

They posed for the picture holding flowers for their mom. They loved posing for these pictures and I loved how they would help each other into the fancy, grownup clothes. 

The glued pasta to wooden frames I purchased at Michaels. The more pasta, the better these look!

I used a photo app called Colorblast to make the pictures black and white and give the flowers a pop of color. 

I spray painted the frames the shiniest silver I could find. They put their pictures into the silver pasta frame and glued a sweet poem on the back.

The kids made cards by creating heart shaped loose part art and photographing it. I got this idea from Stimulating Learning with Rachel. I highly recommend you check out her blog and Instagram account at @stimulatinglearningwithrachel!

They used watercolors to create beautiful gift bags. 

Unfortunately I did not get a picture of the finished gift bags with the card attached. I hope my class moms loved these gifts and that it brought them as much joy as mine did! Someday, sooner than they think, they will be looking at these with tears eyes as they plan their child's graduation party just like I am right now for my son! Happy Mother's Day!

Our Space Inquiry

The kids have been asking a lot of questions about space. I started out by setting out some invitations to learn around the room for them to explore the Earth and the moon during Thinking, Learning and Dicovering Time, inviting them to look closer and document what they noticed. 

We looked closer at maps and the kids created their own maps of a community complete with symbols,  a key, and a rose compass.

They kept asking what the earth was made of so we investigated the inside of the earth and documented what we learned.

In Writer's Workshop we are investigating, enjoying, and writing poetry so we worked together to create a beautiful poem about the earth.

Some kids decided as they were playing that they wanted to use different materials to measure how big around the earth was.

Some areas invited them to show what they knew about the moon. 

This class is so crazy about clay that I had to let them show what they noticed about the phases of the moon using clay!

They also learned that the craters were formed by meteors hitting the surface of the moon. Here they could explore how that happened. 

Books were set out at the writing area to encourage kids to write about the earth and the moon. 

Many books were written not only about the earth and the moon, but the sun, stars and planets also. The kids have started putting teasers on the back of their books to get others to read them!

Pictures were set up at the easel to encourage them to show what they noticed about the moon and earth through art. 

We mixed flour with white paint to create a painting with a textured surface of the moon. They used a bottle to create craters on he surface than wrote a fact about the moon.

We made a giant mural using the textured paint to show what we learned about the phases of the moon. The kids labeled each phase. 

They found out that on the moon they could jump six times further than here on earth. They had so much fun seeing how far they could jump if they were on the moon!

They marked how far they would be able to jump by sticking a piece of tape on the spot and writing their name on it.

We also investigated the sun. They learned that it was the center of our solar system and that even though it looks like the sun is moving across the sky, really it is the earth spinning like a top, not the sun moving, that makes it appear to go around the sky. 

They also learned that it takes one yeR for the earth to travel around the sun. They wrote and illustrated how many times they have traveled around the sun so far!

We were witnessing some beautiful sunsets so I put out warm colors and sunset pictures for inspiration at the easels. 

The kids were surprised to find out that the sun was made out of gasses and not hot lava! This started a discussion about the states of matter. We talked about how everything is a solid, liquid or gas. We were also talking about the Suns heat energy! I figured out a great way to show both! We took chocolate chips out in the sun and observed what happened. They saw that the Sun's heat energy turned them into a liquid! We dipped pretzels into the warmed chocolate and enjoyed a sun baked treat!

New areas were set up around our room to explore stars.  I set up areas for them to create constellations using different materials. 

As we researched, we found out that stars are not all white and that their color shows how hot the stars are. The red are the coolest and the blue are the hottest.

A group wanted to make a universe of stars so they used cotton swabs and paint to create one. 

Our building area became a display area for our universe. 

Mrs. Thompson let us borrow her planets to hang on the ceiling. The kids referred to these often!

We had fun creating sight word constalations with push pins! 

Mrs. Gore let us borrow her Universe Sight Word Search.

We used stars to practice our addition skills. 

I displayed Van Gogh's Starry Night with some glass beads and was AMAZED at what some kids created! They collaborated and worked as a team to create their Starry Night with the loose parts!

Some asked of they could paint Starry Night so I moved the picture and put out similar colors for them. They did a beautiful job!

We created web maps to organize our data.

I put out recyclables at the engineering table and challenged them to make Space Ships! This was a huge hit! They were so creative as they planned out thief designs and then followed their plan. 

Some also created space ships which our pattern blocks. 

Lastly we started investigating the planets. They loved creating planet sculptures and other planet inspired art.

The kids wrote informational books about the planets. 

The kids worked together to paint the planets and then add them to our universe. 

I love following the kids interests and digging deeper. In the past, when I taught using themes, a space unit would have lasted two weeks. These kids have been investigating space for around six weeks! Their learning is so much deeper, their experiences so much richer, when you follow their interests and get rid of your time limits!