4 - Week - Concepting and some Resources

The conceptual stage. Time is of the essence in this project, and while I want to ensure that the final product of all this is highly conceptual, meaningful, helping/useful, all that stuff...I also know that I need to keep in mind a certain weakness that I have in design. I’m pretty great at the conceptual stage, and then I get so comfortable in it that I have trouble moving on, and sometimes my final pieces lack a certain refinement, or finesse, as a result. I really don’t want to get stuck with this project, so while creating my schedule, I plan on building in a lot of time meant for refinement of visuals, rather than of concept. I feel like I’ve got a pretty solid concept anyway. But enough about that.

As I am beginning to create the content for my degree project, which right now I am thinking (open-mindedly!) will be a book (and then something else!), I am making sure that I reference solid, legitimate materials.

These are some of the materials that have been graciously given to me by the lovely ladies of the kindergarten team at Prairie Trail Elementary. Some of them are the very earliest materials they use in their classrooms, while others are handouts and exercises that they give to parents when they come in for the kindergarten screening in april before the next school year. I requested both kinds of materials from them because I was curious to see how big of a leap there was between what parents were encouraged to do, and what teachers were teaching the first couple weeks of class.

These papers, along with various books that I have borrowed from the teachers, is what I will be pulling my information and some of my activities from. On the other hand though, there are a wide variety of online resources I will be pulling from as well, most of them parent's blogs. This information, while not quite as easy to validate, is still valuable when trying to come up with new immersion activities. I'll definitely be taking some liberties of my own to categorize and/or create activities within my project.