Kindergarten paints a neighborhood

"Imagine that you are riding on a bird and flying high above the ground" the instructions began. "What do you see looking down on your neighborhood?" The students closed their eyes (briefly) then hands waived wildly as each wanted to say what he or she had "seen." Students donned their painting shirts and aprons (borrowed from the pre-school) and fingerpainted the things they saw on special paper with tempera paints. They did a large road with a crossroad, a stream and a pond, trees and areas of dirt--dirt intreagued them! Trees without trunks were a hard concept though.

The second week we again imagined being high above the ground and pointing out the buildings we saw and the other things we thought were in the neighborhood. Each drew these on a sheet of paper, colored the drawings with markers, cut the sections out with scissors and glued them to the painting from last week. They even remembered the fire station and the movie theater as buildings they might have on the "map."