Project Overview

This book was created by kindergarten students at the Alice B. Beal Elementary School in Springfield, Massachusetts as part of a learning expedition on feelings – a topic required by district standards as part of the inculturation process to schooling.

As a way for these young students (beginning their first experience in a school setting) to begin to understand and control different emotions and have empathy for others, students working on this project explored feelings through a combination of writing, digital photography and self-portraiture. Each student created a page; the digital photograph on his or her page was taken by a classmate and attempts to capture the feeling they chose to write about. The page also features a colored-pencil self-portrait done by the student showing that emotion.

Each feeling was written about by two students, creating a pair of side-by-side entries.

Students worked on their key boarding skills by entering their writing via computer.

The book has a page of Learning Targets at the end that make clear exactly what students were asked to learn (and succeeded in learning) for this project (e.g. “I put a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence”; “I can choose the correct color for my eyes”; “I can use appropriate words to name my feelings”).  The learning targets relate to academic skills, art skills and social/emotional skills. Without this page, one would have little idea of how much of the book was actually created by the students themselves.