Conferences and THE Question

It is that time of year again. CONFERENCE TIME! We find these meetings so crucial to our classroom community. It is a time where the parent gets to talk about their child without him or her being present- a rare occurrence in a parent's life. Our goal in these meetings is to strengthen our understanding of the parents, child, and to continue creating a trusting bond with the parents.

This year, was a slightly different preparation than before; this year we had to rebuild the written evaluation to better suit the TK standards. After some thought, we felt it best to use the same format as years previous so as to keep things simple for ourselves and the parents. No sense in reinventing the wheel. It took us about three hours! We went through each line of the previous year's evaluation while referring to the TK DRDP (as mentioned in the previous post). Not only was the content so important to us, but the precise wording. We even found ourselves editing wording while evaluating the students to really make it work for us.

Then came conferences. Typically, our school does one entire day of conferences in January. After some deliberation, Martina and I felt it best to move up the date to November. Typically, elementary schools do their first set of conferences at this time, and we felt it more appropriate timing.

We couldn't help but laugh halfway through our meetings when most of our parents asked the same questions!! It was reassuring to us that the parents felt confident in their children's academic abilities, however, it was the social topic that they were concerned about.

Why is my child coming home and complaining about play? 

Are they having fun? 

They say they don't want to come to school. 

My child says people are mean to them. 

What we actually see in their play is nothing like the above statements and questions. We see eight children who go in and out of peer groups depending on their interests and interactions. However, we find that a small challenging interaction or conflict holds more weight in the child's mind; it is what they more often bring home to share with the parents. We reassured each parent that their child spends the majority of their day happy and involved in play, yet we believe that these small conflicts are actually a huge source of learning opportunities. The children are learning that there are different personalities and opinions in the world; not everyone will believe and act the same way in a situation.

Example One: Child A makes a comment and laughs. Child B replies strongly, "that's not funny!"

In this situation, we help both children to understand that there are different senses of humor; not everyone will think the same joke is funny. So, we give them the words. To Child B we first say, "it's ok if you do not think this is funny. You can tell Child A, "I don't think that is funny." To Child A we would say, "Not everyone will think your jokes are funny. This is ok. Maybe try telling your joke to someone else." These words acknowledge both children's feelings while avoiding a negative interaction between the two while giving them an understanding of different perceptions. 

Example Two: In our classroom, the rules around fighting a pretend shooting is that everyone involved has to understand the game and agree to it. A child can only choose to be the "bad guy", someone else cannot choose for them. There is no touching when play fighting. However, what do we do when rules are broken and one child hits another during this time? First, we make sure to be close enough to hear and see this type of play. When a child is hit, intentionally or not, we give the "victim" these words, "so-and-so, I do not like when you ____. Please do not ___ again." We also encourage the children to walk away from play that they do not want to be involved in. By giving children the words and power to defend themselves, we are giving them life long tools to be their own advocate. 

It is our biggest job to enable our students to be strong without us. We want them to know their own boundaries and to listen to others so as to do so without assistance and supervision when they leave us. THIS is truly what preschool is about. 

Educate Yo'self!

This past week Martina and I visited another TK classroom at Discovery Charter School. Before I get started into our visit and learning, I wanted to share with you the mission and philosophy of the school.

Like our school, DCS (Discovery Charter School) follows a Reggio-Inspired philosophy.

You can find their mission here and the philosophy here. 

DCS holds a strong value in family and community participation and outreach; part of enrolling your child in their school includes a certain amount of volunteer and education hours. Although this requirement does not work for our demographic, we do always invite our students' parents into the classroom when they are available to and find different ways to share our knowledge with them. 

I can also appreciate the parent education factor in DCS. Similar to most other practices, the learning should not stop in the classroom, it is the continued support of the parents at home that creates long term growth in a child- especially when working on behavior. 

As with our school and classroom as well, DCS has a strong focus on the social-emotional development of their students; we cannot expect a child to learn who cannot yet sit or have a conversation. Both DCS and our school refers to the developmental needs of each child to guide the classroom practices. 

In order to help children grow, the Reggio philosophy encourages project based learning with a strong focus on the children's interests. In my experience, this way of learning is very effective! For example, the use of a project was able to help a previous student gain comfort in the classroom in order to learn English naturally; he came to us speaking Spanish with little to no English vocabulary. 

During our visit to the DCS TK classroom we both reaffirmed our practices, and acquired new information. After thirty minutes of observing the classroom in action, we had the opportunity to ask the teacher questions. 

During our observation time, we saw three distinct centers; play dough and letter cards, story telling, and coloring. There were also other children working on puzzles, reading books, and building. Clearly, this is a class of much more than 8 children and in a larger space than we have. The classroom appeared to have an easy flow between each of the activities; every child was completely engaged in their work. Additionally, there were two parents working a station each, while the teacher was at another station and floating around between the children. 

A big question we were curious to ask was how this teacher documents and evaluates. She showed us several recording sheets and her evaluation (based on the DRDP). Currently, there is no specific TK DRDP. Instead, TK educators are referring to the Kindergarten DRDP and reformatting their evaluations to fit. We felt that the information on this teacher's evaluation was very similar to our own, but we preferred to keep the format of the evaluation to stay the same so as our parents would more comfortable.