Our group chose to develop a unit on Under the Sea for the kindergarten Language Arts level. We feel that the students would be comfortable with this topic because it is something they can relate to from their previous experiences; for example, through movies such as The Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo, various storybooks, as well as possible trips to Marine Land and Sea World. In addition, it can keep the students actively engaged and interested, as well as cover many Language Arts outcomes.
This topic helped us meet one of the Specific Curriculum Outcomes in particular, which is "begin to use oral language to coherently describe personal experiences." We feel that a complex theme like Under the Sea can allow the students to be creative and use their imaginations to express their personal experiences. Another SCO for the Language Arts Curriculum states "explore aspects of language such as sounds, rhymes, rhythms, language structures, repetition and story telling through participation in a variety of oral language activities." An Under the Sea theme helped us to achieve this specific outcome because many poems, stories, and sounds are inspired by nature, therefore we had many options to choose from when developing our Language Arts lessons. This theme that we chose supports the SCO "begin to ask questions to seek more information" because the sea is not something the children interact with in their everyday lives, their curiosity will be activated and they will begin to formulate questions and seek answers about this unknown world Under the Sea (Language Arts Curriculum Guide 2011, 38).
The Curriculum Guide mentions how we must establish community in our Language Arts classroom to ensure that students feel comfortable enough to reach their full learning potential. We all agree that Under the Sea can be used to enhance the sense of community in the classroom by comparing the classroom environment to the Under the Sea environment. For example, we could tell the students to think of the classroom as an underwater community where we are a school of fish. We have different colours, shapes, and sizes but together we function as a community.
While discussing our individual teaching philosophies, we agreed that our teaching style would focus on a constructivist approach. An Under the Sea Unit would give teachers the chance to exercise a constructivist approach within the classroom setting. For instance, the unit could be introduced by simply reading a story about fish, then allowing the students to actively construct their own knowledge about the sea through exploring various books in the classroom, or writing a journal entry about the things they would see if they were a fish exploring the ocean.
After we decided on this topic, we had to ensure that it covered all the strand of the curriculum. With the abundance of poems, movies, books, and visuals related to Under the Sea, we believe that there are plenty of resources available to us to ensure that we successfully meet all of the strands of Language Arts (Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, Viewing, and Visually Representing) and build a unit that would be exciting and engaging for our students.
