April 4th 2013

Dear Parents,

My name is Jennifer Walden. I am one of the winter interns that have been working with your children on Fridays since the beginning of January. When I began my internship at the ECEC the children were creating their own picture books with Ms. Kurtjian and constantly building structures with the magnate tile shapes. Seeing the children participate in these activities inspired me to have the children create pictures of people and objects using geometric shapes as a project.


For the first lesson I brought shape stickers for the children to use for their pictures. The children were eager to explore the shape stickers at the table. Once they selected their paper, the children began grabbing shapes and trying to get the covers off the back. They were naming the different colors and shape they saw in the pile and putting them together to form images of their ideas. Most of the children made the members of their family in their pictures. They used different sized shapes to represent their body parts. Only a few children made objects like trees, suns and snowflakes. The children were trying to create other objects with the sticker shapes, but the shapes they needed were not available in the sticker form.

For my second lesson, I decide to bring a larger variety of shapes, so the children could create more objects. The shapes were made of paper and needed glue to stick in place. During this session, some of the children were able to create more complex images of people and other objects like houses and building with the new shapes. The children were so excited to tell me and their classmates about all the things they had made in their pictures.

 

I decided to have the children create a scene of an activity they like to do with their family for the third lesson. I encouraged the children to think of their favorite activity to do with their family, describe what they see and use when doing the activity and then try to create the scene with the shapes. The children had big ideas for making their pictures, but they just don’t know all the parts needed to construct their ideas with the shapes. Some of the children got discouraged and gave up on creating their original thoughts and decided to create things they alright knew how to make.

 

In our next exploration with shapes I would like to extend the children’s knowledge of parts to a whole and creative representation of thoughts. I plan to provide the children with pictures of different people, objects, and creatures to use as blueprints to construct the images with the shapes. This will help the children learn the parts needed to create the whole image of the object. In the process they will practice color and shape recognition, creative art skills, and descriptive language skills when describing what they made with the shapes.