Intown Jewish Preschool: Kitah Bet's Rainbow Shadows

One of the Reggio paradigm's most essential components is the concept of Emergent Curriculum, the idea that we allow children's interests to guide the class's direction and what kind of projects we work on. One rainy afternoon, we traced Victoria's body onto a big sheet of paper to show her how tall she was! Jules became very interested, and so we traced her too! Morah Adi had the idea that we could paint their silhouettes with watercolor. The next day in class Benji noticed Victoria's rainbow shadow on the wall and said he wanted one too, and the rest is history!

In Kitah Bet, if we do anything new, Morah Lindsey introduces it first at Circle Time. We talked about how Morah Lindsey would trace each friend, and that friends would get to pick which colors they were painted.

Friends took turns laying on big pieces of paper and Morah Lindsey traced them with a marker! They had to lay very. very still. Lots of friends thought it tickled! Each friend got to choose how they posed while laying down.

Next we used crayon to scribble on our silhouettes. Some friends asked us to write special things on their silhouettes (Benji asked for his sister, mommy, and daddy's letters of their first names). We noticed that when we painted over the crayon, the crayon showed through.

Each day we painted a different friend. Morah Lindsey and Morah Adi made sure there were lots of watercolor choices to pick from, and each child chose which colors their friends used to paint them. Some friends in our class have Favorite Colors (Nathan loves red, Benji loves blue), who opted to use just one color. Other friends wanted to use lots of colors.

Next, Morah Lindsey hung them all around our room. They were the perfect Purim decorations... such bright and beautiful colors, and we noticed they made us feel happy when we looked at them.