Kindergarten of Kaparelli

Project: Our Village

One day while we were discussing something in class one child suggested going for a walk to the village "to see everything". This way this project started . Each child had some idea to suggest about visiting something. So we wrote their ideas down on paper, we typed them on the computer, printed them and put them on a board and each child knew exactly what he was going to do 'outside' later. We also had a digital camera which everybody wanted to try, so we started. We spent 3 weeks exploring our village. It wasn't so easy to walk with 12-14 children -11boys- through the streets even of a small village. It would have been better if some mothers had joined us and helped us; perhaps next time. All the suggested places by the children I were divided into sections, so in each exploration we had 2-3 pre-chosen places to visit and the children to take some photos of.

This was a very pleasant and joyful experience because the children had the opportunity to observe and to discover places which though they had seen previously either on their daily route or in their nearby neighborhood they hadn't necessarily observed them closely.

The second step was to put the floppy disc with the photos into the PC -I did it in the children's presence- Then they evaluated all the photos and suggested some photos should be deleted. We printed the rest of the photos and put them up in the class so that they could also be seen by the children of the other group in our school. I suggested making a model of the village. The children started proposing materials and different ways of construction.. They separated into groups and each of them chose something specific to do.

We all worked together designating the most important places of the village on the model sticking the corresponding tiny printed photos on it so that we had a few 'places of reference' and later it was easy to 'build' up this gradually.

The children made streets and houses with plasticine, trees with pipe wire, mountains with coloured cardboard; we added small animals and flowers and we made the Kaparelli village in our class.

While we were working on this, we also developed various thoughts and questions like: what kind of environment we have around the village, what kind of trees exist, which animals we meet here, which of them live in the village, why families with domestic animals have decreased, and how many such families still exist; we visited one of them and wrote down the kind of domestic animals it kept - it was a small farm. We counted how many churches our village has and how many there are in our photos...

Some children wanted to make a town next to the village and they did... but this is a another story...