Kindergarten Crew // Identity and Community
This fall, Kindergarten started a brand new ELA module and expedition focused on identity and community. We wanted to start the year with a module that helped Kindergarteners build a firm foundation of understanding themselves and the different identities of their classmates that they will be spending a lot of time with. We also wanted students to be able to identify the important people and places in their school and in our entire Detroit community, so that we could use this base understanding to connect all of our future modules and expeditions to our local community.
To learn more about identity, we read some really great stories, including Let’s Talk about Race, The Colors of Us, and Jamie is Jamie (a great children’s book about gender). Kindergarteners did some writing about their own identities as well, thinking about what important things they notice about themselves and what things they love about themselves. After we focused on individual identity, we learned about families, reading books about different types of families and different traditions that families have. Kindergarten students also started to make connections between things that their families do and things that they started to learn about each other’s families.https://sites.google.com/view/detroitcommunityhelpers
After we learned about identity, we dove deeply into community. We read a few books to help understand what community is and who the important people and important places are in a community, including Counting on Community and Franklin’s Neighborhood. Then, we went on a virtual field study to see the important places in DAA (since many students are learning virtually this year and don’t know all the places in our school), as well as learning about some important places in our community: including the hospital, Detroit Public Library, post office, Palmer Park, and grocery store. Finally, we interviewed many important helpers in our community: some familiar faces at DAA including Mr. Lemons, Ms. Vickie, Ms. Eboni, and Ms. Brott; some DAA parents like Dr. Martina Caldwell, an Emergency Room doctor at Henry Ford Hospital and Nate Gangwer who works at Central Detroit Christian; and some other community helpers like Stephanie Fazekas-Hardy, a children’s author and librarian. We even got to meet the Detroit Mounted Police in person, for our first socially distant expert visit!
After all of our interviews and learning, each student chose one expert to write about. They wrote a sentence about what the helper does to help in the community and made beautiful portraits of the helpers. They also made video recordings of their writing. We put all of their artwork and video recordings together to make a beautiful website to inform others about the important helpers in Detroit that we learned about!
You can check out the Kindergarten students’ work at: https://sites.google.com/view/detroitcommunityhelpers ! They are so proud of their learning and are excited to use what they have learned to begin to think about how they as Kindergarteners can contribute to their community as well.
