Our Journey to Africa

Hello family and friends!

It's been great to finally get back in the swing of things this week. I have a lot to catch you up on (I'll try not to write a novel)! As you know, we started out voting on a new exploration and came to the conclusion that we wanted to learn about lions. We spent the beginning of last week doing tons of research. We started our KWL chart and began researching through books and online. We realized quickly that we knew a lot more than we thought about lions. We ended up knowing more facts than we had questions. As we read, one of the main facts we kept reading was that lions are found in Africa. This got us talking about Africa and somewhere along the way our whole momentum shifted. We left the curiosity of lions and devoted our time to Africa. I think it's great for the kids to see that we aren't stuck to a "topic". We are here to explore and discover our interests. We can learn what we want, when we want to learn it.

The first thing we did to explore Africa was finding it on a map. The distance between two places on a map is difficult for anyone to grasp but the main lesson we wanted the kids to learn was that the world is round (we compared the difference in a flat map and globe), that we lived very far from Africa (we would have to fly about 18 hours or ride a boat across the Atlantic Ocean), and that Africa was on a different continent. We discussed that a continent is made up of many different countries. After discussing these things in a large group, we put stickers on our globes and let the kids explore them independently. We asked a lot of questions about continents, countries, and oceans.

We thought a great place to start in our exploration was talking to an expert. Mrs. UD, one of our infant teachers, is from Nigeria so we asked her to come in and speak to us. We learned so much from her! We wrote a welcome message to her on our board and welcomed her with plenty of hugs. She talked to us about traditional foods, music, celebrations, dress, and weather in Africa. She reminded us that people in Africa live the same as we do. They live in cities with homes and families. We spent a lot of time discussing similarities and differences. We learned that Africa only have two seasons: dry and wet. During these times there is either a lot of sun or a lot of rain. We also learned that some countries in Africa have large jungles where many different animals live (including lions). Sadly, we also learned that as more cities grow, more trees and jungles are taken away, and this can harm the wildlife there. She was patient with us as we asked many questions and even brought in pictures for us to see. Thank you, Mrs. UD for sharing your beautiful culture with us!!

Our meeting with Mrs. UD lead us through our exploration the rest of the week. We spent one day focusing only on traditional African music (which we learned has a heavy emphasis on drums). We listened quietly to music then we spent some time dancing to it. We also spent time playing an African djembe along with the music we heard. We left the djembe out for the kids to explore independently. It was an awesome day! We talked about what this drum was made of and how it was used. We learned that if we hit different parts of the drum, it made different sounds. We made a lot of noise and had a lot of fun doing it!

We also spent some time this week talking about resource that we get from Africa. We learned that Africa produces a large amount of salt and cocoa beans. We let the kids explore these recources in any way they chose using tweezers, mirrors, magnifying glasses, our hands, our noses, and our tongues! Some used the tweezers to chop the cocoa beans up and others broke them with their hands. We learned that cocoa beans are really good for us and high in antioxidants. We also learned that cocoa beans can be ground up into a powder and used to make chocolate! We tasted both the salt and the beans. We also discussed the feel and smell and uses of these materials in our every day lives.

We've already learned a lot about Africa and I'm excited to see where our exploration takes us next week. The kids still seem interested and are asking more questions, so we'll continue this exploration until they feel it's time to move on.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Love,
Mrs. Rachael


Approaches To Learning:

• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Show curiosity in an increasing variety of activities, tasks, and learning centers.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.
• Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.

Social & Emotional:

• Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders. 
• Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.
• Manage transitions positively when told what to expect.
• Develop strategies to express strong emotion with adult help.

Language & Literacy:

• Respond to elements of colorful language in stories and poetry.
• Retell one or two events from a story read aloud.
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
• Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.
• Contribute to small group or whole group class dictation activities. 

Mathematics:

• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning. 
• Investigate solutions to simple problems. 
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment. 
• Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
• Organize and represent data with real objects.

Mrs. UD speaking to us about Africa...

 

 

Enjoying our time with the djembe...

 

Exploring salt and cocoa beans...

 



 

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We are artist!