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Totem Poles
Kindergarten, Diane Hawke and Jen Schultz

We decided to do class totem poles as a community building exercise at the beginning of the year.  Projects like these also help to introduce the children to the supplies we’ll use during the year: glue, paint, etc.

First we looked at pictures of actually totem poles and talked about the purposes they served for some Native American tribes.

The children also have a first experience of working in cooperative groups to build a project together. Each small group was responsible for one box, and they decided together what color to paint it; how to make a face on the box; and how to embellish it.

(We got the idea for this project from a 30-year-old handout entitled “Developing Effective Classroom Groups” that one of us had saved.  Many thanks to whoever wrote it in 1977!)