Part of my spring season has been in-person teaching in the classroom, working with students Pre-K through 7th grades, inclusive, which translates to mean projects for nine different ages levels. I'm thinking that I'd like to write about them, one at a time, hoping to give you access to enough info to try them out for yourself. Just to be clear, everything I do with students is closely related to what I am interested in doing myself. For instance, I could happily spend the whole summer doing versions of the Pre-K (4-year-olds) projects that I'm writing about in this post.
Four fold symmetry
For me, the highlight of this spring was when the Pre-K teacher beckoned the school librarian into the classroom, saying, "You've got to see what these kids are doing!" She later told me that she is always amazed at the work we do together. Thinking about this, it makes sense...what we do is always so beautiful, and it's a thrill for the classroom teacher to see this beauty coming from the hands of these young (and still rather wild! ) creatures.
The project that the teacher was excited about was creating these four-way symmetry designs. These young children sit in groups of four at their tables so it made sense have each group work on their own central design. We used objects from the classroom cupboards: scissors, pattern blocks, green dinos, squishy balls, orange bears, whatever! The children took turns placing an object, then the others would mimic the placement.
I was quite taken by the considered choices and the careful placement of the items the children used. What I was not surprised by was how quickly they understood the concept of the four-way symmetry. For years I've been observing that young children carry with them a natural connection to symmetry. I have found that when I can reference the symmetry in the folding projects that I teach, children will connect with the patterns of folding much more easily. I would love to encourage that anyone who works and plays with children to include symmetrical observations and constructions in what you do together.
The other project we did together is one that I wrote about not too long ago, which is a flower and numbers project that becomes a game. Just last fall I wrote a post which describes this project quite thoroughly, but I've now I've discovered a workflow that made the project easier on ME.
This year, instead of bringing my plants to the school and rushing to get things ready I created the palettes of petals the night before. The natural materials came from the floral department of a local grocery store since nurseries in this area hadn't opened yet, and only a few daffodils had been brave enough to bloom here at home.
I placed the petals on small paper plates, covered them with another paper plate, securing them together with staples, keeping them cold in my fridge, then a cooler, until we used them in the morning. Having everything ready to go gave me time to introduce the project to the children which included passing around petals so that the children could feel the softness and smell the scent of the flowers. We also talked about the names of some of the flowers. This slow introduction to what we were doing was such a pleasure.
Students filled in the number outlines with flowers, I photographed and printed their work, then presented them with their own little decks during our next session together.
The work of these children were printed on cover paper (67gsm) then cut then cut by me. the school librarian and the classroom aid ,so each student could have their own deck. The teachers got the larger version for future use.
The Pre-K students were excited to remember which numbers they had worked on. We played games with the the cards, and then paired them with images of words that rhyme with the numbers. The games we played were a mix of ones that I taught and ones that they made up themselves.
If you would like to create your own large flowered numbers, here's the ten page PDF I created for this project.
If you would like to have a small set of numbers for coloring in, or just have the numbers to play this game, here's one page PDF that can be used.
Here is are some written directions for one game you can play with these cards, as a prelude to making up games yourselves.
If you'd like a PDF with some decorated numbers and the drawings I made for the rhyming words, head over to my esty shop to purchase the download for a couple of bucks!
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