We are never too young to start exploring the question “Who Am I?” However, attempting to persuade young children to share their emotions and self-knowledge, while placing too much emphasis on formalized activities like creating a journal, can be daunting in early childhood and elementary education.
For educators and parents alike, the theoretical pathways between the way children learn and how they feel about themselves--and their place in the world--have been clearly outlined within early elementary education and early childhood education curriculums.
However, creating effective and entertaining elementary and early childhood education activities for young children to communicate complicated themes related to their developing sense of who they are while simultaneously providing a sense of play, is one of many pressing issues in early childhood education as well as early elementary education.
The following three early childhood education activities offer a sound platform for creating simple lesson plans that have the potential to yield a wealth of opportunities for young children to share their earliest answers to the question “Who Am I?” with a minimum of formality.
More importantly, all three activities are well suited to activities related to language arts in early childhood education, and early elementary education, as well as teacher and parent involvement in early childhood education.
Creating a Me, Myself, and I Poster
Have the child lie on a large sheet of brown paper while a parent or teacher traces around the child’s outline. Then, after cutting out the outline, have the child paste magazine clippings, which represent things that the child likes, onto their life-sized collage.
Encouraging, not requiring, the child to adorn their Me, Myself, and I poster with additional free hand drawings and embellishment with crayons, colored paper, fabric scraps, buttons, glitter, etc. and then willingly display their creation on a wall or door can often result in an interesting display of a child’s unique vision of how they see themselves.
This mini memoir writing lesson plan not only provides works sheets for helping young children document their answers to the question “Who Am I?” but “What had made me who I am?” as well.
A “Thumbs Up” Memoir Writing Activity for Young Children.
After a brief discussion regarding the topic of how each person’s fingerprints are unique—no one else in the world has an identical one—have the child create an impression of their thumb print on a sheet of construction paper. Then encourage the child to write and or express and have the teacher or parent record (below the image of their fingerprint) the additional things that the child feels are unique to them.
A Walt Whitman Inspired “Who Am I” Activity
A Walt Whitman Inspired “Who Am I” Activity
Teaching Memoir Writing is a free PDF prewriting exercise from Scholastic and Scholastic Professional Books features a free mini lesson plan Who Am I which was Inspired by Walt’ Whitman’s poem “There Was A Child Went Forth” and designed around the concept of inviting young children to think about all the things that effect their daily lives.
For additional inspiration . . .
For additional inspiration regarding the development of memoir related early childhood development activates see consider the following books . . .
· The Art of Teaching Writing, Making Memoir Out of the Pieces of our Lives, by Lucy Calkins, Heinemann (April 4, 1994)
· In the Company of Children, by Joanne Hindley (Stenhouse Publishers, 1996)
· Teaching Memoir Writing, by Perdita Finn, (New York: Scholastic, 1999)