Last Monday, we had our first classroom-led Community Meeting for the year. Each week, when we come together, each classroom will have the chance to guide us by sharing songs, their current learning, or a bit of their classroom culture with us. Here is a video shared by Kindergarten A, showing their experimentation with color mixing, which was also recorded in their science notebooks.
The video comes from the class's "film studio." Teachers record work and the children review it together to determine next steps for learning in their projects. Many viewers will see articulate children, joyful engagement, and discovery, but as part of a goal to make learning more explicit and visible, I'd like to draw attention to other key standards present in the video that we work to meet in kindergarten: understanding and internalizing primary colors and what they do when mixed, applying the concepts (recipe) in other contexts, basic foundations for chemistry, managing the unexpected, articulation of ideas, the scientific method (hypothesis, experimentation, research), managing our bodies and reactions, and working with others towards a shared goal.
This week, as we move towards our celebration of imagination and discovery at our Dumbo Pop-up to meet the global cardboard challenge, our fourth grade will be sharing their process as they built automata using cardboard and other materials at Monday's meeting. We hope others from other schools and communities will come and join us out there demonstrating the capacity of children to invent and create when given the time and tools.