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. 

Park Play

We are so fortunate to have a park less than a five minute walk from school! As a teaching pair, we have taken advantage of this great opportunity for the last two years, and now going into our third. We find this weekly outing to have so many wonderful benefits.

1. Part of the Reggio philosophy includes exposing the children into the community. By doing so, this gives us an opportunity for real life interaction with adults, children and animals they are unfamiliar with. We work with our children to appropriately approach and respond in these situations, especially those who have animals. This will only help our students to feel more safe and confident in public. 
2. The park provides a larger space for lots of running. Need I say more?
3. The park also has a great playground that allows the children to exercise different muscles than our play structures at school. Many of the children have already mastered monkey bars, ladders, and getting onto a swing independently. 
4. A deeper connection to nature is promoted through our weekly park trips. We allow the children to explore the "forest" along the sides of the park, with supervision of course. During these explorations, they often observe and collect their surroundings. With their collections, we are able to return to the classroom and further investigate their findings. 
5. Each of the five senses is deeply integrated into daily activites within the school. However, by visiting the park, we are creating new experiences for the children to explore with each sense. 
6. By visiting the park, we are putting the children in a new setting, creating new and different opportunities for inquisition.  

Self Portraits // Journals

Self Portraits. If you have not done them with your child(ren) or students, we highly recommend giving it a try! It is unbelievable how telling they can be about a child; it directly shows where they are in their development and how they view themselves.

Is their head separate of their body? Or is their head and body the same?
How much detail? Eyebrows? Eyelashes? Fingers? Clothing?
Are body part connected or apart?

In our experience the answers to the above questions are telling of the child; someone who is spatially unaware in the classroom often will draw their body parts detached from one another. Or a child who is more observant of their surroundings will have more detail in the self portrait.

Here, another teachers describes their experience with self-portraits.

In past years, we had the children draw self portraits at the beginning and end to include in their portfolios. This year, we opted to make the portraits more relevant to the children by making them the cover of their journals.

Here is an example of one child's portrait this year. She will be 5 in December. This child chose to draw long hair for herself, despite having shorter hair. Again, self portraits may not always portray the child as they are, but how they personally view themselves. We can also see that this child has a separate head with eyes, nose and a mouth. She also made her body into a triangular shape, denoting that she's wearing a dress- which she often does. The arms, legs, hands, and feet are all attached, and she even included fingers.

Journals, what in the world are we going to do with these? EVERYTHING! The child has a story to share, we write it in the journal. We are observing a specimen in the microscope, but it in the journal. Someone else wants to draw their family, put it in the journal. Every journal entry is dated and the children do as much of the writing and drawing as possible. We have also started asking the children to plan their creations and draw them first to encourage intention. Again, these plans go in the journal. 

We are hoping to accomplish several goals through use of the journals. As I already mentioned, intention, but the journals also will help us to stay organized and have a good view of the child: their interests and development. 

Afternoons and Goodbyes

The majority of this blog focuses on our tasks during the first part of the day, 8:30-1:00. Despite the simplicity of the second part, we cannot negate it.

Everyday, the children have a 30-40 minute enrichment class at 1:10 or 1:45: movement (twice), dance, basketball, and yoga. During this time we prep, and I blog. When the children come back, we either have outdoor time, free play inside, or finish a task, then have snack.

In the first two weeks, we were finding it difficult to have a significant ending to our day; we didn't want to do a final meeting before snack- being that they were still in the classroom for snack, it felt a bit meaningless. A meeting after snack was almost impossible- everyone finishes snack at a different time and their ability to focus is virtually gone.

Is a meeting necessary at the very end of the day when we have already had two or three? 

How can we make an end of day routine that feels final and comfortable?

SOLUTION - our new routine: snack, outside shoes (we were house slippers inside), sunblock, book, goodbye. To say goodbye, the children line up at the door. They can choose a high five, hug or handshake. Most children choose to do all three. I make this a fun and individualized experience for them.

One child absolutely warms my heart every day; she says, "I have to tell you something". Meaning, 'lean down so I can whisper in your ear'. I lean over, and she whispers, "I love you very much". I act surprised every time and say, "I have something to tell you!" I lean over and whisper in her ear, "I love you very much too!"

Each child really enjoys this time. I make a connection with each based on their personality and things that had happened throughout the day. It seems we have hit the nail on the head with a successful ending routine.

Creativity and Democracy

Huh? How in the world can these two words have anything to do with one another?

In group story creating of course!

The last class we had (Rollie Pollies) for two years, was VERY interested in the story of the Three Little Pigs. However, whenever we tried to go beyond felt and book stories, they lost interest.

NO LONGER!!

We are well on our way to creating our very own version of this story. Five of the eight children in our current class came from the Rollie Pollies, and the other three children jumped quickly on the bandwagon.

Here is our process.

FIRST - we read several versions of the story over, and over, and over, and over... for the first weeks of school. We started with the felt version I had been telling them in the Rollie Pollie class. Since they knew the story inside and out, I had them involved in the telling of the story, and eventually they each received pieces to place on the felt board themselves. We also read, the Three Gators and the Big Bottom Boar (this quickly became the favorite) by Helen Ketteman, the Three Little Pigs by James Marshall, the Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas and Helen Oxenbury, and the True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka.

SECOND - It's time to write our own! Now that the children understood that each of these stories came from the same idea, we were ready to discuss what our version would be!

CHARACTERS - Our first discussion was about WHO would be in our story. Every child was given the opportunity to contribute, and all ideas were written down, even the repeats. Right away, it was very clear who they wanted to be the "bad guy"- the Big Bottom Boar from the Three Little Gator version. However, there were multiple options for the sibling characters: gators, wolves, and pigs. I drew the combinations on pieces of paper, and the children were each given a sticky note to vote on their choice. We ended up with a tie and had to revote. 

DEMOCRACY! "control of an organization or group by the majority of its members." (Google) 

We used this opportunity for a little lesson in government: each member has a voice, and the decision is made by the largest amount of votes. 

THIRD - SETTING - Where is our story going to take place? What is the location? Again, we discussed the possibilities and narrowed down to four options, drew them on paper, and voted. 

We are waiting on the vote of one more student to see which option will win. 

WHAT'S NEXT? 

1. What will the three homes be made of?

2. What phrases will the characters repeat.

3. Discussion of beginning, middle and end.

4. Writing the story!

5. Do we make it into a play?

Flower Calendar

In each of the conferences Martina and I attended, and in many articles read, it was very clear that understanding a calendar was of importance to the TK and K world. Yet, we agreed that a traditional paper calendar may not be the most appropriate way to begin this subject. 

So, we discussed WHAT is important about the calendar and HOW could we build up the children's knowledge in order to understand a traditional calendar. This, my friends, has a very fancy word - SCAFFOLDING! One of the most frequently used words in my college educations. 

In education, scaffolding refers to a variety of instructional techniques 

used to move students progressively toward stronger understanding and, 

ultimately, greater independence in the learning process. (edglossary.org) 

Martina came up with this fun solution: the Flower Calendar.

Similar to a circle, the week repeats itself. We wanted to give the children this visual; when Sunday is over, Monday comes again. So on and so forth. 

To begin the calendar routine, we start with a song sung to the tune of "Oh My Darling Clementine":

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

7 days has the week

Sunday, Monday,

Tuesday, Wednesday,

Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

Then, the children take turns flying our hummingbird clip from one day to the next. This is followed by a discussion of the day's schedule and happenings. When there is an enrichment class, the children get to add another clip to the day.