Max time: Check! Portfolio: err...

This past week brought the end of my max time, just as I was beginning to feel really in the swing of things. I had great days both Monday and Tuesday, pulling my unit on the five senses together and feeling very comfortable in the groove of things having to do with management.

It occurred to me I hadn't shared much at all of my unit activities, so that's what this entry will be devoted to. As I begin to work on putting my electronic portfolio together, I'm excited by the diversity of activities that made up the unit, as well as by the extensions to other pieces of the Kindergarten curriculum that emerged. Looking back, I'm very happy with the balance:

Sense of hearing:
- The children each received a plastic easter egg with different materials inside, so as to create different sounds. Their challenge was to find someone else in the group with the same sound.
- We made coffee can drums to play together and to explore patterns, an integral component of the Kindergarten math curriculum, with sounds and hand strikes.

Sense of sight:

In a large group, we read the book Look! Look! Look!, which consists of full-page photos with peek-a-boo windows on the pages preceding each of the photos. It was a great exercise in basing predictions on observations, and provided the foundation for creating our own Look! book with magazine pictures.

We also made our binoculars and went on a walk, observing the environs of our school. When we returned inside, we drew pictures of what we saw and created sentences based on the prompt "I see..."

Sense of smell:
On this day, we moved to our more conspicuous senses. We each took turns smelling four different everyday products (cinnamon, lemon juice, soap, and tea) and voted on our favorite with a graph mat: I placed each product at the head of the graph and the children came up one by one to put a card with their name on it in the squares underneath their favorite. Later, I guided them as they made their own copy of the graph and recorded their comments for display.

Sense of taste:
In combination with our sense of smell, we went on a field trip to the nearby Co-op grocery store, where some employees took us on a special tour of the various storage places, and on a scavenger hunt for locally grown products. And how could I forget: yummy apple slices and cheese awaited us at the end!
I chose to return to something we learned about at the Co-op the following week: I brought in vanilla beans and cut one open to show the children what the seeds look like inside. They had smelled the beans on our field trip and didn't like the smell at all, but they were greatly intrigued by the seeds inside and by the story I told of how the seeds are boiled in alcohol to create vanilla extract. We all tasted the extract next and realized it didn't taste much better than the beans smelled. We cupped our hands together to remember that often, plants and extracts keep flavors locked up tight until a little sugar is added and both are added to something without a whole lot of taste by itself ... and then, our hands burst open, just as the vanilla flavor bursts into the cakes and ice cream we flavor with it. To make up for tasting the vanilla extract raw, I brought in home-made "hot vanilla" (as opposed to hot chocolate), which got rave reviews. "Isn't it interesting," I questioned aloud, "that people have figured out over time how to use a plant to create a taste so different from what the plant started out as?"

Sense of touch:
We learned basic vocabulary for the things we touch - soft, bumpy, smooth, and rough - by feeling a sample mystery object from each category. Later, we used different materials to create our own books of these different textures.
The children loved the Feeling Finding game, in which they drew a card with a black shape on it and then reached inside a bag to find the 3-D version of that shape.

These brief summaries hardly do justice to the great fun we've had. For more detail, check out the link to my teaching portfolio - many of these activities are documented there, and some of them are featured in the entries necessary for VT licensure programs.

It has been a swift transition since my cooperating teacher returned to the classroom on Wednesday from full responsibility to marginal leadership. My last hurrah is tomorrow - Monday - when I will facilitate a culminating Five Senses Fair. Parents will come in and their children will guide through five sense stations. The activities featured are all things we've done together, so that the children can be the experts!

After that, I will greatly decrease my time spent at school, devoting most of my days to finalizing my portfolio. The thought of it does not exactly excite me. I mean, I am always eager to share, but, given the choice, I will always choose the kids. They are the source of my eagerness to share, after all, because they are inspirations in and of themselves. I would have no reason to share if not for my interactions with them.

That may just be the carrot I dangle in front of me: the sooner I get this done, the sooner I am ready to be back with the kids.