“Letters in town”or

school children as city explorers

Balzani first grade class section A IQBAL MASIH Primary school in Rome

Since the beginning of the school year, children have been working on the sounds letters make when we pronounce each of them in order to say a word.

In the Montessori method, this is called sounds'research. In fact this kind of school activity is usually developped throughout the earlier years at the Infant school: between 4 and 6 years of age. But we find that it is never too late to explore sounds…

During the activity of sounds’ exploration, the first year’s children are also involved in circle singing and dancing.

They learn a song written by their teachers years back. It makes a comparison between the letters’ shapes and part of the environment, everyday tools and so on.

Together with the everyday singing, the children start trying to write down in their workbooks both the letters of the alphabet and some whole words, togehter with some drawing of the correspondent object.

Now they start to be pretty much aware that in order to be able to write properly, they have to memorize every single shape of the letters.

We are now heading to the park, we want to find the letters’ shapes in the environment around the school.

The very first is Alessandro Fa who spots a letter “T” made of a road signal…

Can you see it?

Then a few of us cannot miss an enormous “C” shaped sculpture.

This was easier to discover, don’t you agree?

Right near the “C” Martina found a very tall “I”.

Can a word be formed by an “I” and a “C” only?

We wonder…

Villa De Sanctis park is a very well kept and big city park. We usually go there with our families on a Saturday afternoon in the Spring and Summer months.

It is still quite unusual for us going to this park with our teachers!

We carry one walking just for a few steps and…

Here it is, another letter, this is a difficult one to spot.

But sure! That is an “S” !

Well, we are now right into the park, it is a beautiful, sunny afternoon and we just don’t have any hurry to go back to the classroom!

Will there be enough time to spot all the alphabet, though?

Let’s hope so!

Ehi everybody, there is an “O”.In fact, there are three of them…

Nicolas found it!

What about this “U”.Does it make any sense to “YOU” ???

Lorenzo was a very good explorer in this activity!

Well, these ones really look like an “H”, don’t they?

We thought this one could have been an “L” shaped object.

This litter bin really looks like the letter “P”.

This very modern design realization of a litter bin reminds us of the letter “D”.

Our stroll in the park isn’t finished yet, but now let’s have a look at what we did back in our classroom …

Do you remember the “C” shaped sculpture?

Well, Margot has drawn it as she remembered the big object in the park. Wasn’t she very accurate?

Here there are some more drawings , by Giulia and Alessandro

These are our workbooks, in Italian we wrote about our school trip in the park. There are a few mistakes, some of them make our writing quite funny for the italian reader…but never mind, since we are still in the first grade!!!

Let’s see what else we found in the park: quite a few more letters!

A sort of “G”… even though we know that for our Greek friends this looks like a Delta, really!

Can you all see a “U” shape made of the sunlight…And what about this new “S”, that’s not the public bench any more…

This is a beautiful “V” shaped tree, don’t you agree?

And now, to finish our round…two letters that we do not have in the Italian alphabet: the “X” and the “Y”.

Back in our classroom we tried to share our ideas and impressions on the school trip at the park.

Some of us were enthusiastic about it since not many families find the time to take their children to the park, ever in winter.

Then we agreed on the need to work on the shapes we observed and we all had a go at drawing them, everybody on their own workbook.

What follows is the result:

This is Riccardo’s reproduction of the tree’s “Y” shape.

And this is Alessandro’s “T” shaped part of the playground

These are some of our drawings

And some more drawings…

And this is the last lot…

We hope you’ve enjoyed our work!

BYE BYE