I finally caught up a bit on politics this week… Democrats, Republicans, Independents, let’s not just put on a good show, let’s do some *real* good for this nation. Please.
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~Teachers, check out The Student Bill of Rights over at The Elementary Educator. Mark Pullen hit the nail on the head with this one, demonstrating pro-student advocacy over the priorities some teachers insist upon, usually for their own convenience.
One of the reasons for my off-mood last week was the abundance of clueless-about-kindergarten statements that were made to me or about my students by colleagues. Everything from “wow, it must be hard to teach kindergartners, I mean, because those little guys can’t do anything” to “hey, your one girl, the medicated one? I don’t think she’s medicated enough…”
Early childhood and kindergarten do tend to be grades that teachers either love or avoid like the plague. A room full of five year olds can frighten adults who are uncomfortable around runny noses, accidents, spills, outbursts, loco-motoring through story re-tellings, broken crayons, and yes, hand holding when it comes to learning how to cut, hold a pencil, or tying shoes. I am not a person who is bothered or annoyed by those things, because I understand that every person alive, at one point or another, experienced this developmental stage, learned through it, had fun in it, and is, in part, alive and successful today because of it. They learned how to cooperate, they learned how to decipher the chicken scratch that is writing, they learned to obtain information from not just the printed word, but illustrations and verbal communication from teachers and classmates. They learned to recognize patterns, sort, classify, count, evaluate, re-arrange, build, and use tools and materials around them. They learned to create, learned new techniques, asked questions, shared joy, and made friends. They learned to take care of their personal needs, and with the right teacher, they learned that school was a good place to be and a safe place to try out activities new and unfamiliar. While many of my colleagues don’t remember their kindergarten years, let me gently remind you all: you didn’t master “being at school,” fine motor skills, social skills, or demonstrate academic prowess in the first twelve days of your kindergarten year. In fact, you didn’t master them for much, MUCH longer. Take a breath. Think before you speak, and please stop speaking about my students within earshot of them (by the way, we can hear your cackles and criticisms around corners, where we’re waiting, quietly lined up, for our turn with you). None of you have heard me say something like “Oh those third graders” or “Oh, all those students in the upper grades,” have you? Nope. Because I understand that while I haven’t taught third graders or secondary students, they are NOT incomplete or inadequate people because they haven’t yet mastered the school curriculum in a way that is convenient or ideal for you or me.
And new kindergarten teachers…if anyone approaches you with the classic “Oh, you teach kindergarten? So you just PLAY all day, right?” statement, just remember: most people play to learn and spend their lives trying to obtain mastery. Don’t believe me? Watch a colleage be introduced to a new computer program that s/he has to use for work. Then watch them play computer Solitaire, or Concentration, or type a letter to a friend. What are they doing? Practicing and developing techniques that will help them when they use the new computer program. Ever see an adult pick up a new hobby like knitting or painting? Were they experts on the first try? Nope. They made mistakes. Probably got frustrated a few times along the way too. *Might* have even thrown the paintbrush or knitting needles aside…”this is too hard!” Sound like some five year olds you might know?
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New Teacher Tip: For those of you who have a general elementary education degree, you can usually be credentialed to teach grades K-6 or even K-8. If you’ve been hired to teach kindergarten after your practicum experience has been in any grade OTHER than kindergarten, you’re probably in shock right now, especially if you didn’t have to take early childhood development courses for your major. My advice? TAKE SOME ECHD COURSES PRONTO. Kindergarten is NOT the same as grades 1-6, and it is NOT “easy” like babysitting either. FIND BOOKS, ARTICLES, AND BLOGS ABOUT TEACHING FOUR TO SIX YEAR OLDS, find out who a “master kindergarten teacher” is in your district, apply to take a day’s leave from your class and go observe that teacher. Ask permission to take your digital camera. Take notes. Ask questions. Keep in touch.
SpeakerSue shared this on her blog, but I had to share it here just for the sheer child advocacy of it all in regard to what our children see and think about when they watch television and movies today. Mr. Rogers is speaking before the Senate in this video, regarding funding for PBS, seven months before I was born:
**The following was originally posted by me at In Practice**
It’s that time of year for kindergarten teachers: planning to meet “next year’s” (August’s) kindergartners. After Easter and spring break, school districts nationwide hold their Kindergarten Roundups, encouraging enthusiastic parents and usually eager-yet-nervous children to start making their immunization, school shopping and pep talk plans in the hopes that the first day/week of kindergarten is emotionally survivable for all involved. I have to admit, I’ve never been able to keep the image of lassoing five-year-olds-that-yes-have-made-the-cut-off-date out of my mind during spring registration, and in fact, several of my former administrators have even suggested that my colleagues and I “troll for kids that look old enough” as we drive through the school’s neighborhoods before work each morning. Each administrator has wanted our numbers to be as close to accurate as we can have them before school staff sizes are re-evaluated over the summer due to increases or decreases in enrollment- very understandable.
Teaching in schools with larger student and family populations that fall within lower socio-economic levels means that I have had my share of hosting kindergarten “sneak peeks” involving myself, my students, future students, and their preschool or Head Start teachers, and not the students’ parents. Typically, preschool teachers contact me and my colleagues in advance, asking us to look at calendar dates to find a morning or two when they can bring their students over to see what kindergarten is all about. They ask to sit in on storytime, centers, and participate in snack and possibly recess. I of course, give my Super Stars the heads up that younger visitors will be spending time with us during the week, and each year we inevitably agree that we should do what we can to help them feel comfortable during their stay.
Three or four students per preschool teacher arrive for their sneak peek, usually wide-eyed, and not at all reluctant. I purposely revisit old standby stories such as Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See or Green Eggs and Ham for storytime, and my Super Stars teach their guests the motions to our fingerplays, “Two Little Sausages,” “Once There Lived a Quiet Mouse,” and songs like Shake My Sillies Out. The preschoolers visit the learning centers they are most interested in, and can tour the classroom and its materials on their own, with a friend, or with one of their teachers. Painting, playing with blocks, dressing up in the pretend center, counting/sorting/classifying with math manipulatives, pounding and rolling clay, putting puzzles together, working on the computer, playing musical instruments, or quietly looking at books…are some of the activities that I will watch my future students exploring during their visit. *
Why am I watching instead of putting myself front and center, vying for their attention? For one, I might not be their teacher in August. Two, I feel it’s important that the children make this transition successfully in their own way(s) and in their own time. It’s not important that students *like me* when they first meet me, it’s important that they feel welcome, and that they feel safe. And finally, yes… I’m taking mental notes, sometimes scribbling thoughts and observations down about each of the children as they familiarize themselves with their future environment.
~Does the child wear glasses? Hearing aids? Appear to have physical limitations that differ from his/her peers? What is the child’s size, and how does s/he use physical space? Does the child squint, or say “huh” or ask for directions to be repeated again?
~ I listen to them speak…is there an accent? Is the child bi-lingual? Is only English spoken in the home? Does the child speak English at all? Understand it without speaking it? Are there pronunciation issues separate from language comprehension and expression? Regardless of oral language, does the child prefer to use sign language of some sort, gestures, to communicate rather than speaking?
~ Does the child interact with others? Others of the same gender? Opposite gender? Does the student only demonstrate parallel play? Does the child recognize and choose to acknowledge and cooperate with transitions?
~ Is the child passive or aggressive? How about passively aggressive (that one usually takes time to observe once the new school year has started, unless parents, a previous teacher or daycare provider tells me in advance)? Allergic to anything?
~ Is the student a watcher or a do-er? A little of both? How long does it take him/her to come out of a comfortable shell?
~ Is the student aware of his/her own needs and wants, and is s/he capable and willing to be in control of belongings, potty issues, and sharing resources? Does the student ask for help?
~ Left handed? Right handed? Ambidextrous? Knows how to cut, hold a pencil or crayon, and move objects and materials from hand to hand smoothly?
~ How does the child move? Running? Jumping? Climbing? Walking, skipping? Does s/he have good balance?
~ Does the student appear well nourished, clean, wearing clothes that fit? Does s/he appear well rested? Is the child lethargic, or a bundle of excess energy?
~ Does the child like to complete one task before moving on to another, or does s/he flit and float, moving between activities and projects, dabbling a little bit here, a little bit there?
~ Are hands and kleenexes used when the child sneezes, or are sneezes wide open and shared with the classroom? Does the child still put objects like toys, pencils, crayons, rulers, scissors in his/her mouth?
~ I also listen to our guests, what I call “professional eavesdropping.” Do my students shout out “Hey, we have that book at our house!” Do they question what paint or clay is? I can learn a lot about my future students’ prior schema just by listening in on their stories and interactions while they’re in my room.
Colleagues at each of the schools I’ve worked have asked me if I can tell with just one visit which students have had prior exposure to a school-type setting or structured learning environment, if I can tell which students have been read to nightly at home, which students have experienced hands-on learning, which students have made mudpies with real dirt and water and which have only made them by drawing or painting them with a computer program.
Yep. I can. While I hope that Kindergarten Roundup leaves each preschooler with a good feeling and anticipation about the upcoming kindergarten experience, it gives *me* my own sneak peek, providing me with vital information that I feel better about having long before the DIBELS test booklets arrive in the building in the fall. Recognizing and appreciating the wondrous diversity, strengths, needs, and potential that each new class represents makes essential relationship-building happen more smoothly and naturally for our youngest learners.
Welcome to kindergarten! Bienvenido!
* Yes, some schools include preliminary formal assessments for incoming kindergarten students during Roundup . I’ve worked at one that did, and two that did not. My own preference is to refrain from putting barely-five-year-olds through additional performance stress on a day that should be about discovery, bravery, inspiration, anticipation, and belonging. Of course, that’s just me.
“Guess what? Play is required for the healthy development of children. Imagine that.”
“It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.”
Parents, teachers, administrators, “behavior specialists,” this is a *must read*.
I thought I’d preface my latest blog with an image of the bright, vibrant coloring crayons that herald the first day of kindergarten with their sharp “never used” points, exotic names that can’t yet be read, and that **smell.** Crayons and brand new pencils, colorful plastic handled scissors, and glue sticks (I know better than to unleash wet glue during the first week of school) all welcome schools’ newest attendees each August or September. As of this April, I’ve opened thirteen years’ worth of crayon boxes, glue stick lids, paints, clay, and silly shaped erasers and pencil sharpeners. But now, after experiencing three different interpretations of what kindergarten is and should be in Alaska, New Mexico, and Kansas, I feel the burning urge to learn how to open up something new: a huge can of “whoopass,” and so my choice of images changed.
My grade level partner and I more than survived our last round of S.F.A. observations last week. Considering we teach at a “non-S.F.A.” school, we have found it interesting that we’ve still been bound to the S.F.A. script whenever the observer has come to visit. Apparently we don’t care much for bondage, and so we enjoyed turning the tables, going through the motions, putting on the show, just to see what, if anything, our observer would “catch.” We purposely created exactly the same center displays, wall artwork, sentence strip vocabulary words and poems, hallway bulliten decor, and lesson plans as eachother, all following the S.F.A.’s KinderCorner assigned unit, “Buggy About Spring.” Sounds like we followed the script, right? Not quite. The centers, the artwork, the sentence strip poetry and the hallway displays followed the THEME of the unit, but none of the ideas came from the actual S.F.A. “Buggy About Spring” unit handbook aside from a xeroxed bug counting “book” that the kids traced and colored at the math center before they moved on to counting bug shaped manipulatives and measuring with inchworm rulers. My colleague has shared her own monthly journal idea with me this year which all of our students have enjoyed, another non-S.F.A. gimmick, and we displayed our students’ work, both academic and artistic as nice features in our classroom. As Easter was right around the corner, we even blatantly displayed paper bunny baskets, eggs, and multiple packages of egg dye and grass, none of which were included in the unit’s script- a big “no no” according to other kindergarten teachers in the district. While our students loved learning about bugs and “ooohing” and “ahhhhing” and “oh-grossing” over the non-fiction selections about insects that we checked out from the library (nope, none of the books on the acceptable or recommended lists), our students enjoyed, learned, and expressed themselves in ways that the S.F.A. observer found exceptional. No black marks on our observations. Lots of praise and Atta-Girls. Yet while we might have set up what looked like the prescribed props, nothing matched. And there was no comment made about it.
This could have been for any reason: we still seemed to follow the “format” of the S.F.A. program so no harm done; perhaps the observer remembered we weren’t an S.F.A. school so she wasn’t going to be such a stickler this time around; maybe she felt we were going above and beyond, obviously supplementing the “already terrific” materials and lessons that S.F.A. provides with our own ladybug poems and non-fiction selections; or maybe she had no clue that our students were in fact demonstrating that they could be fully engaged, eager to share and experience, and be both guided and work independently in a classroom that has not followed an S.F.A. script throughout the year. Perhaps she was just glad to be winding down after so many observation visits. Maybe she was distracted by her own thoughts of Easter egg hunts and pink dresses. I noticed what she didn’t say, what she didn’t point out, what she didn’t question, what she didn’t ask, knowing that there are many, many teachers killing themselves in this district, bending over backward, pulling themselves inside out reading verbatim from the script and props the observer is supposed to be checking on during her visits. The truly frightening aspect of it all? Most of those teachers truly feel they are **teaching** by putting themselves on autopilot, happily putting their thoughts, inspirations and goals INSIDE the box- the S.F.A./NCLB box.
We attended our last grade level meeting at Central Office. We sat in a room with other kindergarten teachers and the directors of curriculum and instruction. We were asked what we’d noticed about teaching a full-day kindergarten program this year, and almost every comment volunteered from every table had to do with how well the students were performing on DIBELS or how the S.F.A. observer had been pleased with the progress shown in reading and writing in most, if not all of the classrooms, thanks to, you guessed it, the S.F.A. KinderCorner materials (talk about a sales pitch, eh?). When I volunteered that the students had obviously benefitted from having more time to practice their socialization skills because of the full-day schedule, my comment was politely recorded into our table’s notes, but the brainstorming quickly returned to DIBELS, sounding out nonsense words, and questions about how to supplement for those “high kids” in our classrooms. Recognizing my chance to contribute to the conversation, I offered that it’s really easy to find challenging-yet-not-discouraging materials for the kids at the top of what used to be the bell curve, and that collaborating with first grade teachers and librarians would make it easy to find inspiring and interesting texts for students that wouldn’t be redundant when they went to the first grade. The responses? Totally **lost** looks and:
“Um, no, the district should just really buy us the first grade Reading Roots program so I can follow with the S.F.A. curriculum.”
and
“Uh, I’m sorry, but if the other kids, the lower ones, see the higher kids with different looking books, there’s going to be a problem.”
The thought running through my mind at that point? “Sweethearts, there’s this really cool room in each school in our district. It’s a MAGIC room, with helpful little elves and magical stories, interesting facts, amazing graphics- perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s called a LIBRARY. It’s okay to think on your own, really.” Dimples dimples dimples. Smile smile smile. And my grade level partner **just KNEW** what I was thinking because of our amazing Vulcan-Mind-Meld-Bond, so she told me to START WRITING. Ah yes, Grasshopper, “think it, don’t say it.” So I was a good girl, and started writing. Furiously.
The meeting continued, and someone asked how students were doing on reaching their kindergarten benchmark goals as outlined by our state standards, as well as on other assessments, too ridiculous to list. Several teachers offered that they pushed, pushed, pushed students to constantly improve with lots of practice outlined in the S.F.A. manuals, yadda yadda yadda, AND THEN, the “teacher trick” of all Teacher Tricks reared its ugly head:
“Well in MY room I have an academic referral chart. All the kids’ names are on the chart with the DIBELS skills and S.F.A. goals listed and whenever the kids master a skill, they get a star. If they don’t master the skill and make progress, they get a minus, and those kids you know, they don’t like hearing their friends say ‘ooooohhhhh! You got an academic referral! Ohhhhh!’ Those kids know the pressure is on!” At which point I not only THOUGHT the following, I said it: “Oh good! Five and six year olds with ulcers! Sign me up for THAT!” I then remembered the graphic above that I had come across while dressing up my MySpace page, and it seemed to **fit.**
Math skills? Science? Social Studies? Socialization? Fine and gross motor skills? How kids “feel” about school? Nooooooooooooooooooo, NOT the priority. DIBELS DIBELS DIBELS. “Hey, those kids have to be introduced to the types of assessments they face in the upper grades, might as well start them now!” Yes, another quote.
I never thought I’d be one of the “old timers” with only thirteen years of experience under my belt. One of those old-fashioned teachers who talks about “teaching the whole child.” An old bitty who has favorite authors and can think up the names of books and poems for kiddie lit. on her own. Someone who actually believes in thinking OUTSIDE the box, and frankly believes that we SHOULD be able to teach our way out of a paper S.F.A. bag. A crazed eccentric who believes in shifting the paradigm, and therefore KNOWING the paradigm. The outdated model that can actually punt when necessary, and think on her own.
No, apparently here in Oz, teachers are much too worried with impressing the Wizard to be bothered with even noticing the curtain at the left-hand corner of the room. And so it’s not Glinda’s crown and wand I’m wanting. It’s Dilbert’s dog’s.
