The Best Part of Me!

The Kindergartens and I built a book in the Learning Commons. For the teachers, it really tested our ability to question and to inspire those rich, wonderful utterances from students.

We asked ourselves:

• How do we generate conversation? How can we forgo "leading" questions?
• How can students express emotions and put meaning to experiences, without an extensive vocabulary? How do we get students to speak in metaphor?
• What questioning encourages students to open up and express their thoughts?
• What is appropriate wait time?

We went for exploring emotions, ideas, feelings, experiences, and for giving meaning to students' daily lives/routines. We read the book "The Best Part of Me" by Wendy Ewald, then turned around and made our own!

It took a while, but we were able to abide by the Reggio Emilia belief that "The child is worthy of being listend to." We honoured how important it is to "listen, observe, interact, and learn from the child(ren)". And really, it was the kids that wrote the book and the teachers who worked on their questioning skills...

Below are some of the pictures from the book. It is absolutely beautiful (for us) because of how the students' voices reflect their personalities and their uniqueness, and how succinctly they touched on the important things in life.

Of course I can't put student names on here, and I've had to blur out faces... But I am working on getting the paperwork done so it can be celebrated! We have published a hard-copy version of it through iPhoto for our Learning Commons... If you're interested, swing by and we'd be happy to show it off!

Here is a link to a small bit of the book.