We Are Unique!

Hello Lovely Kinder Families!

In our second and third week of school, our class finished up our very first mini-project - We Are Unique! This project was intended to help our class build community and get to know each other. We set out to investigate our differences and similarities, and what makes us special and unique!

We began by reading the books Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes and I Like Me! by Nancy Carlson. These two books discuss the importance of being proud of your uniqueness! We followed up these readings by examining our own names. We counted the number of letters in each of our own names during Math Workshop and charted the results. We wondered what other kinds of charts we could make to describe our similarities and differences. We also decided to chart our eye colors and our hair length during other Math Workshop days.

Then we read the book The Colors of Us by Karen Katz. In this book the main character Lena wants to draw a picture of herself using brown paint, but her mother, and artist who loves mixing colors, takes her on a walk around their neighborhood to learn that brown is more than just brown! Together they look at their friends in the neighborhood and discover so many delicious shades of brown like a light yellow creamy peanut butter brown, chocolate cupcake brown, peachy-tan, or a bronze-amber golden-jewel brown. After we read this book together, our class discussed how many ways we can look different and special from one another.

We looked at some other books about children and examined ourselves as well, and we noticed we all have different combinations of hair color and texture (curly, short and straight, mohawk!, black, blond, light brown with blonde stripes), have different colors in our eyes and on our skin (just like in the book- imagine that!), we noticed our varying heights and styles of clothes (short sleeves, long pants shoes with laces and some with velcro).

After noticing all these special differences that mad us unique, we decided we should probably draw our own self-portraits just like Lena did! We looked at some examples of famous self-portraits done by artists like Leonardo Da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, and Frida Kahlo to get inspiration, grabbed out mirrors, and got to work!

We created many self portraits! First we drew our faces with pencil and crayons using mirrors to help us get our images just the way we wanted them! Later we made abstract "Nature self-portraits", made out of "interesting things" we found during our weekly garden walk. Our 7th Grade Buddies helped us glue the pieces together, it was a lot of fun!

We also made drawings of our whole body, breaking it down into three sections: head, middle, and legs. These ended up being our first drafts we created for our flip book - We Are Unique! We discussed all the ways we could make ourselves unique, and after our 1st draft, we also learned about critique! We learned that these 2 words don't just sound similar, but that you can use critique to improve your unique work!

To give critique to a friend we learned that it must always be:

1. Kind - keep your friends feelings in mind, they probably worked hard already!

2. Helpful - give them ideas that they can really use, and...

3. Specific - tell them exactly how you suggest they improve their work

You can see our final draft of the We Are Unique book in our classroom now!

Besides noticing our physical differences, our class discussed how people's passions, what they know a lot about and what they care a lot about make them unique as well. We shared about all of these things and wrote responses through pictures to highlight what makes us special!