Kindergarten Lesson 6: Y

This lesson was difficult for me on multiple levels. First of all, what even starts with Y that is useful in every day life????? Second of all, with the morning class I kind of didn't realize how quickly the time went by and unfortunately left almost no time for the step 4 activity, which was kind of the point of the lesson.

The students did love imagining the perfect ice cream sundae though.

In the morning class, the machine consisted of two lines of students with their hands touching at the top, creating a "tunnel." I selected a couple of students to choose a yucky food and walk through the tunnel as the students said "yuck, yuck, yuck..." repeatedly until the student came out of the machine with his/her ice cream. They would explain the ice cream to the class and then the students would say "yum, yum, yum!"

Okay, I know what you're thinking. "That's not drama." I know, and it was awful. My mentor had even warned me about it in an email. I totally failed my last lesson with my A.M. kindergarteners because I tried to teach everything in 15 minutes instead of adapting and keeping the most important things the most important. So I went to a completely new gear for the P.M. class.

With the P.M. class, we spent a lot more time making fake "yucky foods" and eating them together.  I said "Aw man! Well now we have all these yucky foods. Any ideas how we can make them yummy?" The kids suggested that we try to put different "toppings" on them to see if it would make them better, but the majority of the class still didn't like them. was a brilliant transition when one of the students said "I know what we can do! We can build a machine that will make the yucky foods into yummy foods!" With that, we colored our ice cream, and one student even drew what the machine could look like! I was in awe at the engagement and student-driven learning that was happening in the classroom!

However, in our efforts to bring the machine to life, things did get a little chaotic when the students tried to stuff the machine with themselves. You could say that our machine clogged up and kind of exploded, and that's how the lesson ended unfortunately.

I'm definitely still getting the hang of this "classroom management" thing.

I can't believe my time in kindergarten is over!! I'm going to miss our adventures so much... I feel that I have grown so much as a teacher this semester! With many failed attempts, unfortunately... But oh well. You gotta make so many mistakes before you make improvements, right?

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Casey Greenwood

BYU Arts Bridge

Kindergarten

Lesson: Y

Strand: Create, Perform

Standards:

• CR.1: Develop imagination to create artistic ideas and work.
• P.6: Use imagination to support artistic choices.
• P.9: Share dramatic play and guided drama experiences within the classroom or with invited guests.

Objective: Students will recognize the letter y sound and will be able to use their imagination to bring a situation to life by pretending to be inventors that use a machine to turn yucky food into yummy frozen yogurt.

Materials needed: Whiteboard and marker, ice cream sundae black and white pictures (1 per student), crayons/markers

Step 1: Have the students tell their carpet buddies some foods that they think are “yucky.” Next, have them talk about what ice cream/frozen yogurt flavors that they think are “yummy.” Ask the class for suggestions of ice cream/frozen yogurt toppings that make any ice cream/frozen yogurt even yummier. Write a few examples on the whiteboard.

Step 2: Have the students, at their tables, color the ultimate frozen yogurt sundae with all their favorite toppings.

Step 3: Invite the students to gather at the carpet. As a class, create a “yummy machine” that will turn any yucky food to yummy frozen yogurt. Talk about what the machine looks like, how big it is, suggest that we should paint it a color that has a y sound (yellow), etc. The class will create the machine with their bodies, leaving a pathway for the “foods” to go through.

Step 4: Have the students, one by one, start at the opening of the machine and tell the class a “yucky” food. It is okay if it is the same as someone else’s yucky food. The student will then take a “plate full” of the yucky food, walk through the machine, and when they come out, they will show the class their yummy frozen yogurt sundae that the yucky food turned into!

Lesson 5: C

What I ended up teaching was actually really different from the lesson plan. I think I have learned a lot about classroom management with kindergarteners, and while I am definitely not perfect and often rely on my teacher partner for help, I can tell how much I have learned by how much I adapt while in the classroom, or between the morning and afternoon classes.

For this lesson, I had an idea that I thought might be too complicated, so I avoided writing it in the lesson plan. However, I decided to try this idea with the afternoon class and it ended up working MUCH better.

After discussing with my teacher partner and my mentor(s), I realized that collaboration in kindergarten doesn't have to be working with a group to make a group decision (because more opinions means more likelihood for arguments and chaos), but it could even be thinking about something and telling a partner that thing. So I tried to include a lot more two-person collaboration and less teamwork in this lesson.

Due to lack of time, Instead of reading the story, I told it from memory and showed pictures that were in a Gingerbread Man book that my teacher partner had in her classroom. Instead of clapping, I had the students say the "can't catch me" lines with me. I tried to get the morning class to spread out for step 2, but they kind of ended up being in a somewhat-spread clump on the carpet that we had read the story on.

I think I often get overwhelmed when giving instructions and think that I am not doing well enough, which often makes me second guess what I am saying, which then confuses the students because I explain the same thing three different ways or so. So that's definitely something I need to work on.

I did make sure to include an example and had a student act out with me an example of how the Gingerbread Man could get away, but I made the mistake of giving all the directions before that instead of giving them as we would go, or giving some before the example and some after. Because of that, I think the morning class was a little intimidated and didn't really know what to do.

But thus said, some of the kids were really excited to show what they had done! One partnership showed the Gingerbread Man getting ready to ride on a Crocodile across the river. However, I also found that many children raised their hand to volunteer not actually having anything prepared. I tried to walk these students through it like in the example and that seemed to work fairly well.

The afternoon class went much better, granted that I also figured out a better way to give the instructions for the step 2 activity. As aforementioned, I tried my original idea with the afternoon class and ended up liking it much better. Instead of having one child be the Gingerbread Man and one child be the c sound means of escape (which could get complicated, especially in "car" for example), I had one student be the Gingerbread Man and one student be the fox in each partnership. Then I had the students choose a c sound word that the Gingerbread Man could use to escape from the fox and show that in their frozen pictures. I found that the kids in the afternoon class were much more creative, but that's because they could use something in the scene instead of having to be something, which I think gave them a lot more freedom to be creative. The afternoon class were using things like cookie canons, cages, and candy walls to escape the fox.

Next time I teach this lesson, I'd like to spend more time on allowing the students to explore embodying the Gingerbread Man or the Fox, because I found that many of the students didn't know what to do with their bodies in their frozen positions, so we got a lot of similar physicalities. Totally my bad on that one.

On another note, sorry I post my pre-teaching lesson plans instead of my post-teaching, edited lesson plans. It would probably be more beneficial to post the latter, huh.

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Casey Greenwood

BYU Arts Bridge

Kindergarten

Lesson: C

Strand: Create, Perform

Standards:

• CR.1: Develop imagination to create artistic ideas and work.
• CR.5: Create character through physical movement, gesture, sound, and/or speech and facial expression.
• P.5: Use the body to communicate meaning through space, shape, energy, and gesture.

Objective: Students will show their ability to recognize the letter C by creating a different scene of the Gingerbread Man story with a partner.

Materials needed: Gingerbread Man story

Step 1: Invite the class to sit in a circle. Read the Gingerbread Man story to them, and ask them to clap their hands when they hear a C sound. Pause once in awhile as you read to invite them to pantomime certain activities (ie rolling the dough, running in place, etc.) and, after a couple of repetitions, say with the Gingerbread Man “Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!”

Step 2: Have the students get with a partner, spread out, and face me. Together they will think of a C word that is another way that the Gingerbread Man could run away (if they can’t decide on one word, see if they can mix the two together somehow). For example, they could decide that he could take a car or ride on a crocodile to get away. One could be the Gingerbread Man and one could be the means of escape (ie crocodile) or another person, but remind them that they shouldn’t sit on each other if the Gingerbread Man is riding on something, but they could sit next to each other or the crocodile could kneel while the Gingerbread Man stands (maybe getting ready to get on), etc. If the Gingerbread Man is riding in a car, maybe the other student could be a person chasing the car (like the Little Old Lady or something). If both students want to be the Gingerbread Man, have them do it twice so each gets a turn. On the count of three, they will freeze in a position that shows the Gingerbread Man running away in this way. Have a few partnerships at a time stay frozen while everyone else observes and switch around until everyone has had a turn. As they are frozen, ask each partnership to explain their scene to the class.

Lesson 4: Rrrrrrrrrr

I LOVE pirates. So naturally, when it came time to teach integrated teaching-letters-and-drama-simultaneously lesson, the letter R OBVIOUSLY meant PIRATES in my mind. I was so excited to teach this lesson, and I was SO sad when I couldn't find the bucket of jewels that I had prepared (it literally disappeared!) for the lesson, but once again, I don't think the children were that disappointed.

Unfortunately I spent waaaay too long simply naming the pirate ship in step 1 with the morning class, so I felt that the rest of the lesson was a little rushed. In addition, I had imagined the students to collaborate at their tables and create one central unified flag, however, I forgot that these were kindergarteners that I was working with, so the flags ended up being simply a collection of random drawings without much communication at all. This collaboration thing really is harder than I thought it would be.

So I totally thought this was in my lesson plan, but it must have been in a draft that somehow didn't make it to the final even though I thought it was there (????) but I had the students pretend that an enemy ship was attacking and we brainstormed ideas of how to get them to leave. Here is a clip of the morning class fighting off the enemy ship with all kinds of weapons they could think of:

The afternoon class was full of ideas of how to fight off the enemy pirate ship. I asked them if they could think of words that had the r sound that we could use to fight off our enemies. One student suggested that we could build a giant robot, and to my surprise, the class began building off of each other saying things like "I'll make the feet!" or "Here is the head!" etc. It was fascinating to watch their imaginations come to life! Naturally, we sent the robot off the plank and it destroyed the enemy pirate ship. Victory was ours!

Instead of searching for letter Rs around the room since I thought that would get crazy if some students finished before others, I made a separate flag specifically for the letter R and had all of the students write an upper case and lower case R on it and continue working on their own flags when they were done. Here they are at work:

I really enjoyed this lesson. Although it was far from perfect, I think the students had a good time, and hopefully they won't ever forget what sound the letter r makes!

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Casey Greenwood

BYU Arts Bridge

Kindergarten

Lesson: R

Strand: Create, Perform

Standards:

• CR.1: Develop imagination to create artistic ideas and work.
• CR.2: Arrange the physical playing space to communicate mood, time, and locale.
• CR.5: Create character through physical movement, gesture, sound, and/or speech and facial expression.
• P.5: Use voice to communicate meaning through volume, pitch, tone, rate, and clarity.

Objective: Students will show their ability to recognize and write the letter R and pronounce it in words and will demonstrate their ability to bring an imaginary character to life physically and vocally by pretending to be pirates on a pirate ship and by selecting and writing the letter R to get to the treasure.

Materials needed: Paper, crayons/markers, projector and appropriate computer access/connection cables, bucket of rhinestones, papers with many different letters and numbers written on them

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Hook: Arrange the tables and chairs to be the boundaries of a pirate ship. Help everyone get into character by pretending to be on a pirate ship, swaying with the waves of the ocean. On the projector, show the letter R and have everyone say “AAARRRRRRRRR” like pirates.

Step 1: Group practice. Think of some names or words with the class that start with R and choose one among the words to name the ship. Some examples might be Ruth, Rufus, Ruby, Rhino, Rex, etc. Have the class vote by saying “RRRRRRR” for the name they think is best! The one with the loudest cheer wins.

Step 2: Individual/group practice. Show some more examples of things that start with R or have R in it on the projector and remind the students of the words that you thought of together as a class. Some more examples of pirate-related words include Rubies, paRRot, Royal, FiRe, etc. Hand each student a sheet of paper and give them access to crayons or markers and have them design their own flag for the pirate ship. The flag should have the letter R on it somewhere and a picture of something that starts with R or has R in it (or it could even be a red flag because red starts with R). While the students are coloring, the teacher should scatter numbers and letters around the room. This could also be done in groups of 3 or 4 - students could make a flag together.

Step 3: Assessment. R marks the spot! Tharrrr be treasure near these waters. When they are finished with their flag, they should individually look around the classroom to find a letter R among all the other letters and numbers that are scattered around the classroom. When they find the letter R, they should bring it to the teacher who will reward them with their very own ruby rhinestone!

Kindergarten Lesson 3: The Witch's House

As I began to teach this lesson, I quickly realized that the rules would be way too complicated to explain. Instead of making a separate sound for hot vs. cold in the step 2 game, I discussed with the students what sounds they heard in the story or they might hear from the Witch's House story. Starting out, I had one student choose what sound we should make, and we would make that sound louder if they were close to the hidden prize and quieter if they were far away. Later on, when the students were more familiar with and comfortable with the sounds, I had the students choose whatever sound they wanted to make as the "trick-or-treaters" searched. Unfortunately I forgot to bring candy, so instead I drew the "Witch's house" on a sheet of paper and hid that, but I don't think the kids were any less engaged in the lesson because of that.

I was shocked at how much easier and clearer my instruction was in the afternoon class vs. the morning class. So I suppose that I often have to learn the hard way when it comes to giving clear instructions, especially for kindergarteners.

One of our goals for the semester was to get the students collaborating and working in groups, so I attempted to have students hide the "Witch's house" together while the "trick-or-treaters" closed their eyes, but this turned out to be a matter of who could grab the paper and run first. And since I realized that I don't really know how to solve arguments without taking a side, maybe collaboration wasn't going to be as easy as I thought it would be.


Students cover their eyes during the hunt for the witch's house activity.

Students were really creative with where they wanted to hide the witch's house!

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Casey Greenwood

BYU Arts Bridge

Kindergarten

Lesson: The Witch’s House

Strand: Create, Perform

Standards:

• CR.1: Develop imagination to create artistic ideas and work.
• P.5: Use voice to communicate meaning through volume, pitch, tone, rate, and clarity.
• P.6: Use imagination to support artistic choices.

Objective: Students will demonstrate their ability to create an environment and create meaning with their voices by selecting and imitating their own sounds for the witch’s house in a “Hot and Cold” trick-or-treating game.

Materials needed: We’re Off to Find the Witch’s House by Mr. Krieb, candy or other treat

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Hook: Read We’re Off to Find the Witch’s House by Mr. Krieb to the students, up until the witch comes to the door. As you read through the story, have the students make the sounds of the witch’s house along with you so that they can become familiar with what kind of sounds there are on the way to the witch’s house.

Step 1: Assessment. Ask the students for suggestions of what other sounds might be on the way to the witch’s house. Do them as a class.

Step 2: Group practice.  Split the students into four groups. Have one group be the trick-or-treaters, and have the other groups participate in making the sounds that are in the witch’s house. Have the trick-or-treaters close their eyes or leave the room while the teacher hides a treat or other object somewhere in the room (a different spot for each group). While you are hiding the treat, tell the groups that when the trick-or-treaters get close to the treat the class will laugh like a witch or say “We’re not afraid.” Then have each non-trick-or-treater group decide and what sound should mean “you are too far away (cold)” (it’s okay if they are all different sounds to create the atmosphere of going to the witch’s house). Make these sounds as the trick-or-treaters try to find the hidden object, determining how far or close they are to the hiding spot. Have the trick-or-treaters hold hands or something so they don’t separate from one another. If they separate from each other, then everyone has to scream because the witch will get them and they have to switch jobs with another group! Once they find the treat, switch roles if there is time. Don’t give them the treat until the end of class.

Step 3: Transition. Finish the story.

Kindergarten Lesson 2

I think one of the most important qualities that a teacher can have is adaptability, however, I also feel that this is a difficult quality to develop. However, due to my own transportation mistake, I ended up being late to teach my second lesson to the morning kindergarten class, so I was forced to dramatically alter the lesson last-minute because we simply didn't have time for everything. The lesson as it was supposed to have gone is posted below, however, with the morning class I ended up doing the step 1 activity (in which we explored the lengths and widths to which our bodies can extend) and then leading the class in a game of "The Amazing Zoo Animal Choir" once they had gone to their separate tables (in which we explored the lengths and widths to which our voices can extend).

In this game, I had a student at each table choose an animal that they wanted their table to be (i.e. lions or monkeys), and then when I pointed at a table they would make their animal sounds. I encouraged them to explore the different tones and volumes that they could create with their voices by instructing them to be louder or softer, or to have deeper or higher pitched-voices. I was pretty proud of myself for making a last-minute adaptation like this! Fortunately I was able to do this lesson with both classes the next week, since I couldn't meet with the afternoon class on that particular day.

When I did this lesson as written with the morning class, I guess I hadn't put much thought into what the other students would do while the zoo customers were watching one group of students, so I felt bad because some of the kids appeared to be a little bored while only two groups were interacting with each other. So for the afternoon class, I adjusted. Instead of having one group of "customers" at a time, I had one group of "animals" at a time and had the entire class become the customers. I encouraged the customers to take photos, draw pictures, etc. and for those that were behaving well, I asked them one at a time what they "saw," to which the animals would adjust what they were doing. I even allowed the animals to get out of their "cages" and walk around the space and go up to people once in awhile.

To play around with creativity and characterization, I started asking the students about specific qualities of the animals they were looking at. I asked them questions like "Are these (mice) mean or nice?" "Big or small?" etc. If a student said "mean," then I would encourage the "mice" to make the meanest faces ever. There was one point where the mice escaped from their cages and started crawling around the classroom! Students, without my instructing, jumped up on their chairs and were screaming and laughing with excitement! Hopefully we didn't bother the other classes too much.

This lesson taught me a lot about student engagement and what it looks like, which came very much in handy in my future lessons.

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Casey Greenwood

BYU Arts Bridge

Kindergarten

Lesson 1: Zoo Part 2

Strand: Create, Perform

Standards:

• CR.1: Develop imagination to create artistic ideas and work.
• CR.2: Arrange the physical playing space to communicate mood, time, and locale.
• CR.5: Create character through physical movement, gesture, sound, and/or speech and facial expression.
• P.6: Use imagination to support artistic choices.

Objective: Students will demonstrate their ability to use their imagination, bodies, and voices to bring a setting to life by pretending to be animals and customers at a zoo.

Materials needed: Lots of open space!

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Hook: Ask the students what animals they might see at a zoo (ie monkeys, lions, elephants, etc.). Ask them to show you how those animals move and what they sound like.

Step 1: Group practice. Invite the students to play a game of “Follow the Leader” in which they will walk around the classroom while pretending to be certain animals. Start the game by being the leader, inviting them to portray their animals in different ways, such as being a big monkey vs. a small one, being a fast turtle vs. a slow one, or by having a deep dog bark instead of a high pitched one, etc.

Step 2: Assign roles to four different stations including a specific kind of animal for three of the stations (ie station 1 is the monkey station, station 2 is the tiger station, etc.), but assign one station to be the zoo customers. Assign the students a station that they will be a part of for the zoo game (this can be done by counting them off in 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. and have all of the 1s together, etc.). The zoo customers will walk altogether to each of the stations and observe the animals there. If they went to the lion group first, the lions would play on their own for a few seconds. The teacher will then ask the customers what they “see” at the zoo and will select students to give suggestions. For example, Joey might say “I see a lion climbing on rocks.” The lion group would then pretend to climb on rocks in their den. Sally might say “I see a monkey eating a banana!” or “I see a sleeping snake,” after which the monkey or snake groups would then reenact what Sally suggested. After going around to a couple of stations, switch roles and let a different group “see” the zoo.