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.