What We See, Manhattan New School

 Greetings from a kindergarten class at the Manhattan New School in New York City! We have been inspired by pictures and books made by the kindergarten class at the Bond Lake School. We ventured out into our own surrounding neighborhood on Friday to see what we could see. Our city streets are quite different from the more rural country surroundings of Bond Lake. We made a venn diagram comparing and contrasting the objects and places in the neighborhoods.

We wanted to share some of our favorite pictures during our neighborhood walk in Manhattan. 

We will be working on writing and illustrating our own book about our neighborhood sights. 

Stay tuned!

We Can See Winter...But where did it go?

Last week we went on a winter walk with our Snowflake Inquiry group.  The students in this group helped me to determine which photographs they wished to include in our next contribution to the "We Can See Project."  They also took leadership in the class and shared their discoveries with the other students who did not wish to be apart of this inquiry group.  Learning is a collaborative process in our program, and as such we are always learning from and with each other.

Although we planned to add student descriptions to each page, we thought that we would share the images we captured with you first.  Possibly a ComicLife or Pic Collage book companion will follow this post.  The Snowflake Inquiry group also mentioned to me that they would like to use iMovie and go outside and videotape themselves and their conversation about snow, snowflakes, and winter.  Of course to protect their privacy, I will edit any content that might make them recognizable online. 

This Monday, my intentions are to talk about this video with our class, as we continue to wonder about the weather changes and where all of the snow has gone!  I will also take the descriptions we documented and re-visit them with the students.  If they continue to be pleased with their initial observations, then we will decide what book format to use for our companion. 

Stay tuned!

For blog visitors, this is our first YouTube video!  

Please consider viewing it in the larger format by pressing on the "YouTube" symbol on the bottom right, liking it, and subscribing to our new YouTube Channel where we plan to post many more videos (from the "We Can See Project," other inquiries, and general information we would like to share with all of you!)  

As a class we plan to monitor the number of views, likes, and subscriptions to our channel.  

Parents, we would also love your support with this new extension to our blog space!  Try to view, like, subscribe to the video from home and have conversations about it with your child.

We Can See Snow!

Here in Mississauga we had a wonderfully wintery holiday. I was happy that the cool weather lasted so that we had snow upon our return to school this week. As I had expected, the students were elated to play in the snowy yard, and to go explore the grounds around the school. We practiced dressing "head to toe for snow" and set out each day to enjoy the season. I overheard many comments about sledding, building snowmen, and other favourite activities, but a common thread of many comments was what had changed all around us: "I can't see the road!", "I see a snowy mountain!" and more. I invited comparisons to what we had seen around us before the holidays. Naturally, this led to us revisiting our fall "We Can See" book to make connections and comparisons.

One of our favourite stories from fall was Kazuo Iwamura's: Hooray for Fall!, and I had placed the winter book, "Hooray for Snow!" on our book display for later reading. This connection led to the idea that we could also make a winter book just like we had made a fall book. Here is what we saw at school this week. We hope you are enjoying winter where you are too!