Discovering Friendships: Fruit of the Spirit Bracelets for Kindergarten

Discovering Friendships: Fruit of the Spirit bracelets

“Patterns in God’s World”

Lesson Plan for Kindergarten

Prepared by Ms. Yandell

OVERVIEW & PURPOSE

Introduce STEAM to our kindergartners by discovering patterns and learn about God’s love while making friendship bracelets.  We will explore the importance of discovering friendships, so the students can learn more about their community here at CCS.   

EDUCATION STANDARDS

1. 21st Century communication skills
2. 21st Century collaboration skills

OBJECTIVES

1. Discovering new friendships
2. Discovering our school community
3. Discovering God’s love and faithfulness through the Fruits of the Spirit
4. Being respectful of our words and being good listeners
5. Understanding the good of the team over their own viewpoint- how to compromise
6. How to encourage others
7. When you don’t do your part, it let’s the whole team down

MATERIALS NEEDED

1. 1 pipe cleaner per child
2. 9 color beads

VERIFICATION
After friendship bracelets are done recap with the following questions:

• Did your team group together today?
• Did you listen to each other?
• Were your ideas listened to?
• Did your discover new things about your classmates?
• What are the Fruits of the Spirit?

1. ACTIVITY

   Gather straws and cut them to be the size of beads.  Provide each child with a pipe cleaner to build their bracelet.  Separate the class into three to four groups, with four to five student.  In the center of each table, beads and straws will be arranged in color categories.  Gathering around the table, each child will take turns and pick out one bead at a time and answer a question that is designated to that specific color.  The students will all draw from one color group at a time and share their answer to the question with their group of friends.  Once they have collected all of the color beads and have shared about themselves with their friends, they will make a friendship bracelet that follows a color pattern for their class.  
   Colors Questions:
   Blue -  What is your favorite movie?
   Pink- What is your favorite animal?
   Orange- What is your favorite food?
   Green- What is your favorite ice cream?
   Yellow- What is your thing to do?
   White- What is your favorite game?
   Purple- What is your favorite color?
   Brown- What is your middle name?
   Red- What is your favorite book?
   
   
   Friendships Bracelet Class Pattern -  Repeat twice
1. Pink- Love, Orange- Joy, White- Peace, Purple- Patience, Blue- Kindness, Brown- Goodness, Yellow- Faithfulness, Green- Gentleness, Red- Self Control

Recap by Julie Davis:

In kindergarten, our theme for the year is "I Can...Discover" with the lens of looking for patterns and order in God's world. Our kindergarten students are starting the year working on the themes of friendship, sharing about themselves, learning about the fruits of the spirit, and learning about patterns. This lesson integrated all these ideas into one exciting lesson with a take away to wear home. For me, it was exciting to see how this project reinforced the learning in the classroom. In the future, I think allowing the students to create a "class bead" and printing it on the 3D printer would be another fun option to further integrate STEAM into this lesson. Striving to improve a lesson is always important whenever I reflect on how things went. Stay tuned for more details on what next week's lesson entails!

Charging full STEAM ahead in lower school!

Our lower school has been working hard for the last two years to create integrated thematic units that create cross-curricular connected opportunities for learning. Research has long shown the value of connection and CCS has worked hard to embrace thematic units more deeply for next year. Because nothing ever happens by chance, God has also allowed the lower school the opportunity to put "hands and feet" to these units through a generous grant from The Conversant Group. For those of us working, plotting, and planning towards more STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) endeavors for our lower school students, this grant fell into our laps much like manna from heaven! It has allowed our school to fast forward our desires and goals for more STEAM experiences in the elementary school.

What does this look like? As the technology coordinator in the lower school, it has been my desire to create opportunities for more computer science enriched endeavors for our students at every grade level. With this grant, we were able to hire our STEAM coordinator. She and I will work together with our curriculum coordinator and teachers to create project-based learning (PBL) opportunities that directly build on the thematic units our teams of educators have been working on for the last two years. Project-based learning will become the "hands and feet" of these great units! The beauty of PBL is that it creates authentic learning opportunities for our students and gives them some voice and choice in the direction of their learning. Because PBL is often a team approach, it will teach the important 21st century skill of collaboration to our students. Our students will have multiple opportunities throughout the year to work with our team as we co-teach with the classroom teachers to provide these rich project-based learning experiences that may include things such as coding, 3d printing, videography, engineering, and problem solving opportunities. But that's not all...

The 2016-2017 school year also brings the concept of Friday elective days for our fourth and fifth grade students. These students will be able to choose from a variety of learning opportunities including anything from knitting to mountain biking, but due to our grant every quarter at least one offering will be an experience to enhance STEAM learning. Quarter long opportunities in coding, circuitry, 3d printing, and robotics are just a few of the things on the drawing board for our students. Speaking of robotics, Mrs. Yandell will also be heading up two after school opportunities that will include the first ever lower school robotics team and a circuitry after school learning experience as well! Last year our middle school had its first ever robotics team that received many accolades, we want to do the same in the lower school and build an even stronger foundation for robotics at CCS!

According to The New York Times, 65% of elementary students' jobs aren't a reality yet and many of them will be STEAM based. By exposing our students to a variety of STEAM activities we feel we are preparing them to think positively and expectantly towards the future before them. It's exciting times in the lower school as we are charging full STEAM ahead with our students!