A Hunting We Will Go Part 2- moving to a map

The continuing of "A Hunting We Will Go" activity:

First let me mention that I see my kindergarten class once a week for 45 minutes. Sometimes I know that I do more than I should in a class period but I try to plant little seeds as much as possible. Hopefully those small tidbits will be remembered and we can build on them.

So after we played the game I asked my students to pick a hand and we put a "fox" on our finger. Then we let the fox dance in the air while we sang the song. We did this a number of times making certain that we switched our hands and picked our favorite hand to use. We always made an "X" to start and we made sure to stop our fox at the end of the song. We talked about that the song had a beginning and an end.

Eventually we took our air map and put it on the floor in front of us. We were careful not to let our fox go in front of our neighbor. Again, we did this many times, switching hands, drawing an "X", and making sure to stop at the end.

I believe that I should have stopped at this point and not gone to a paper map but we did move on. I know that a paper map should really come after the children have had many experiences of just singing and drawing imaginary maps in the air and on the floor. It probably would have made the paper map experience better. But- on to the paper. Each child got a piece of paper. We drew an imaginary X, and then did our map on just the paper as we did in the air but keeping our fox only on our paper. The children were very good about following all the directions. Very eager to do whatever came next. I also passed out markers and we went through the whole process with a marker. Drawing our map and then following what we drew with our finger.

This was an interesting point. I am always curious to see if they are able to follow their map and start and stop. It usually doesn't work. But for first experiences I do not expect them to be able to do this. Nor would I expect until after many experiences of drawing and following. All that I have explained was done over two class sessions. I did not use the entire class time on just this song/game. I had other activities planned. We also do a listening part, listening to our "composer of the day" and we did another song not related to the SongWorks program.