backpacks November 6, 2009

Dear Parents,

I’d like to take this opportunity to talk to you about backpacks.

It may surprise you to hear that I would like them to be empty, most of the time.  This means I would prefer it if your child not use it as a dumping ground for crayons, markers, snacks, books, coloring books, and old art projects.  Please help your child clean out his/her backpack tonight, and help him/her keep it that way.  This will also give you a chance to check for contraband such as candy, gum, or toys that cause distractions at school.

When your child comes home from school each day, please check your child’s backpack.  There might be a note from me in there.  There might be important news about something that is happening tomorrow.

On Fridays, please check for the Friday folder, and for a week’s worth of finished work.  Please remove from the folder everything that is for you (the newsletter, the school newsletter, etc.) and keep it or throw it away.  Please don’t send it back to school.  For one thing, I already read that stuff; I wrote it.  For another, if you send it back to school, I have no idea if you got a chance to read it or not, and I have to decide if I should throw it away or try sending it home again.  Please remove your child’s finished work, and do what you will with it.  I sent it home on purpose; I do not need or want it back.

In the winter, please send your child to school with a pair of shoes in the backpack, so that he/she will not track melted snow and dirt into the room with his/her boots.  On Monday mornings, please return the Friday folder.

That is all that should be in the backpack.

Thank you.

Mrs. X.

cherry October 10, 2009

Cherry is my other problem.  (It’s funny; in any other year, neither Cherry nor Pumpkin would really count as a behavior problem, but this year, everyone is such an angel that these two do stand out.)

She keeps testing me.  She doesn’t listen, doesn’t follow directions, keeps interrupting.  It feels deliberate and disrespectful, and it irritates the heck out of me.  She has already gotten in trouble in Music, and she has had to sit in the “Take a Break” chair more than anyone else.

I called her mother on Thursday, and it was helpful.  For now I’m going to operate under the assumption that attention is the problem.  She needs attention, and will do negative things to get it, and it’s possible that paying attention to things is difficult for her.

So my plan is to keep giving her hugs (she is one of the huggiest in a very touchy-feely class), especially in the morning right when she comes in, to catch her being good and give her specific feedback about what she is doing right, and also to help her with personal conversation before transitions to let her know exactly what she will need to do.

We’ll see how it goes.

Pumpkin’s mom October 2, 2009

This was the conference I was most concerned about, and that I thought about the most.  I rehearsed in my head over and over what I would say to her.  As it turned out, she was very open to what I had to say, and she even said, “I feel relieved that I’m not imagining it, that’s it’s not just me.”

So we’re going to move ahead with the first intervention for speech, with the speech therapist’s help, and we’ll see how that goes.  After two interventions that don’t work, we refer him for assessment.

He was at the conference today; while Mom and I talked, he played with legos, blocks, and whiteboards.  He has such a sweet face.  He kept interrupting us to show off his work.  I really hope we can help him this year.

parent conferences October 1, 2009

Man, I love this class.  Every single parent showed up today, except for one father, who called in advance to say he couldn’t make it, and rescheduled for tomorrow.

My young single mothers this year are the types who started collecting books for their babies when they were still pregnant, and now their kids have upwards of 200.

My non-English speaking families are the types who show up for conference early, and who share their delight in their children’s humorous activities.  And also want to ask questions about homework.

I’m sipping my first glass of wine in a month (decided to go without for September, just for the heck of it), and it is delicious.  And I’m in such a good mood.

letter of the week? July 21, 2009

I teach my students a letter of the alphabet each week.

Phew.  I said it.  I know that those are fighting words to some teachers, so I’m prepared to hear why some of you DON’T do a letter of the week.  And also to respect your arguments.  Here’s a little bit about why I do it.

When I got my master’s degree, I was taught to use a very naturalistic, child-centered, theme-based approach.  That’s what I did in my first year of teaching, and in my second year, I had to face the fact that I had sent my kindergartners off to first grade unprepared.  Sure, I’d talked about letters a lot, and we had played with letter puzzles and magnets, and we had read a ton of books, but none of it really sank in, and they arrived at first grade without being solid in the alphabet.  Granted, this may have had quite a bit to do with the fact that I was a first year teacher, but I also felt that my approach was part of the problem.

The kindergarten team was made up of four women, all of us relatively new to teaching, so we used our lunch breaks and our team meetings to hash out — and agonize — over what we had been taught to do, and what was actually going to work for our students, 98% of whom lived in poverty.  One woman on the team, who is African-American, started teaching her students in a more thorough, teacher-directed way, and we saw that it was working.  We read Other People’s Children, by Lisa Delpit, and we visited an Afro-centric charter school that was using direct instruction, and we started to modify what we were doing.  What I learned most from Other People’s Children was not to make assumptions.

What we think of as a “normal” curriculum for kindergarten or first grade, based on what teachers have been doing for years, works based on the assumption that parents do their part:  read to their children daily, talk to them, listen to them, take them places, give them educational toys.  Children in poverty generally don’t get these things, and they arrive at kindergarten almost completely unready for a traditional curriculum.  We can’t assume that they have been exposed to the alphabet, or that those little squiggles have any meaning to them at all; we have to give them what they are missing, and what they need.

For that reason, I spend a week on each letter.  I teach what the capital letter looks like, what the lower case letter looks like, and what sound it makes.  We practice the names and sounds of the letters daily, and my pack of letter and picture cards gets bigger each week, so we keep revisiting the old ones.  We look at a bunch of ABC books, just for the page of the letter of the week, and we compare the pictures for that letter in each book.  I sing their names in our good morning song, pretending that they all start with that letter.  We write it in shaving cream or we write it on whiteboards.  We look at our nametags, and figure out who starts with that letter, and who has that letter in our name.  I’m always looking for new ways to highlight the letter of the week, and revisit the letters we’ve already learned.

On the other hand, there are definitely some thoughtful reasons not to do a letter each week, like this page from Pre-K Pages, and this book at Amazon.  What do you all think?

our day at the park June 28, 2009

Every year, a few days before the last day of school, I take my class to a nearby park for our end of the year celebration.  (Last year I called it our end of the year party, and one of my girls showed up in a gorgeous party dress — we had to find park playclothes for her to borrow at the nurse’s office — so this year I was careful not to call it a party.)

It’s more fun if parents come along, so this year the children made invitations to take home, and I invited younger siblings to come, too.  We had a very good turnout (8-12 parents, 2 newborn babies, 1 older baby, and 3 toddlers), and it was a great morning.

We stopped at my favorite coffee shop along the way to pick up treats, and then proceeded to the park.  Everyone was in a good mood, and the weather was perfect.

There is a home daycare a block from our school, and I know the sisters who run it.  Every year when we come to the park, the sisters and their charges are there.  Still, I had a wistful feeling when we arrived.  Miss Slinger wasn’t with me last year, and Ali and Nan are gone, so I was the only one who remembered our past visits to the park, or realized that this is a long-standing tradition.  Well, Ferdinand was with me last year, but this whole year he has behaved as though everything we do is new (Marvelous Mittens Day?  Wow!  Never heard of that before!), so I don’t think he remembered.

We ate our treats, admired the babies, played in the sand, climbed to great heights, and shared our sand toys.  There were many caterpillars to be found — thrilling — and the grownups enjoyed chatting and sipping their iced coffees.

Then one of my boys shoved a toddler (the little brother of a classmate) face-down into the sand.  I walked over just in time to see a crying child, with his mouth full of rocks and sand, and some of my other boys looking shocked.  The Pusher (or so shall we call him today) looked at me and admitted doing it.

“Why did you push him?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” the Pusher said.

I put him in timeout at the side of the playground for a little while, checked on the toddler and apologized to his mother, and then went back to talk with the Pusher.

“It’s not okay to hurt other people,” I said.  “I know you are really sad about your mommy and daddy not living together anymore.  It’s really sad.”

“Yeah, it’s really sad,” he agreed.

“But you can’t hurt people, even if you feel sad or mad.”

We discussed it a little further, and then I sent him to apologize.

Twenty minutes later, he was on a climber leading up to a slide, when the same toddler tried to climb up and join him.

The Pusher shoved him off.

The toddler fell three feet and landed facedown in the sand, again with his mouth open.  He could have been terribly hurt, but luckily, he was fine, just upset.

I was so upset myself that I could barely speak.  I took the Pusher by the hand and put him in timeout again, without saying a word to him.  Then I paced and breathed while I tried to figure out what to do.

I realized that the Pusher was a danger to this particular two year old (a two year old?!  Who hurts a two year old?!) and had to leave the park.  Miss Slinger, at my request, took him back to school, to the behavior room.

It put a pall on the whole morning.  The Pusher’s parents, when they learned about it, were really upset.  They have had a very painful year, and they know that it has had an effect on their son.  The behavior lady decided to suspend him — for the last two days of school — because this wasn’t the first time he’d been violent in this way.

I was tense and depressed for the rest of the day.  It’s so hard not to be affected when one of my students is struggling.

to call or not to call May 5, 2009

So today I noticed, half-way through a busy morning, that Kid had a weird mark on his face.  I looked at it closer, and thought, that looks suspicious.  I asked Miss Nelson if she’d noticed it, and she said she had, but that she thought it was fine. 

We asked Kid how he got that owie and he said, stumbling and stuttering, that it was from falling off a skateboard.  How do you get a scab in the outline of  a circle, with a dot scab in the middle of it, from falling off a skateboard?  (The scab looks a bit like a tiny Target logo.)

I took him to the nurse, to Miss Nelson’s chagrin, and on my way saw the social worker.  She looked concerned, and told me later she was thinking the same thing I was.  The nurse then looked at it, and said it out loud.  Cigarette burn?

So then the issue is whether or not to report it.  Kid is not articulate; he cannot tell a coherent story to save his life.  He kept saying it was from falling off a skateboard.

I went back to the room and told Miss Nelson our suspicions.  She got agitated, because she finally has Kid’s mom back in contact with us, and the relationship is good at present.  And…Kid’s mom did finally take him to the doctor for the infections, and he is recovering nicely.

We finally decided that I would call Mom.  Mom stuck to the story — it was a skateboard injury.  She said it happened when her kids were at the park, and that’s what they told her happened.

So for now we are going to go with that.  We’ve got no evidence that someone harmed him, other than a strange mark on his face.

But I’ve been feeling awful all day, and I think this is the cause.

Access to pre-K for Spanish-speaking children April 27, 2009

Here’s an interesting article about the barriers to getting Latino children into preschool.

I work at a school with a significant Latino population, but in the beginning, when my program was added, I attracted mostly native-English speakers.  Slowly, parents at the school with younger children learned about my classroom, and each year I have more and more children whose first language is Spanish.  (Why oh why did I study French in high school?!)

I’m always proud to send them on to kindergarten, knowing that they will do very well, and that they are much better prepared than their peers.

Ana Solano, who immigrated from Mexico five years ago, was unaware of the importance of early childhood education until the home-based visits began for her 4-year-old daughter, Ana. She said she immediately noticed a remarkable difference between Ana and her older son, Juan Carlos, who had struggled in kindergarten. “I just thought he would pick everything up in school. With Ana, I see how much it helps and how much better off she will be,” she said.

I hope that with a new administration in office, early childhood will get increased funding and attention, and ALL kids who need it, will get access to high quality preschool programs.

Thursday: neglect? April 24, 2009

I have a kid in my class — let’s call him Kid — who is one of several children at his home.  He’s got some issues.  He also has had green goo coming out of his nose for months, his breath is stunningly bad, and his adenoids are swollen and slimy.  If I were his mother, I’d have taken him to the doctor ages ago.

Miss Nelson has been concerned about him, I’ve been concerned about him, Miss Slinger has been concerned about him, the speech therapist has been concerned about him, and the nurse has been concerned about him.  The speech therapist says he’s so congested he can’t form the sounds correctly, and his infection is probably in his ears, because it seems like he can’t hear her.  The kids stay away from him because he smells so bad.  He’s needy and he bursts into tears at the slightest provocation. 

Miss Nelson and the nurse have been trying to reach mom for ages.  Finally Kid’s social worker went to the house to meet with mom.  Upshot is, she said she would take him to the doctor (she said she did, months ago, and the doctor said there was nothing wrong.  I find that difficult to believe.).

Then Thursday morning the social worker emails us and says, do we have enough evidence to file a report of medical neglect?  Miss Nelson promptly goes into a tizzy and we all try — and fail — to meet, so emails go bouncing around.

We decided to give mom one last chance.  She said she would take him to the doctor on Friday (today) so we’ll see. 

If within two weeks we see no evidence he is receiving medical care, we will file.

YUCK.

Friday: blood April 24, 2009

So Titch kicked a little boy with Down’s Syndrome in the face and knocked out his tooth.  Apparently there was blood everywhere.

We were on the playground, and I was trying to gather my goslings to line up and get ready to go home, and Titch — the line leader — was missing.  Miss Slinger found him and brought him  in, and then next thing I know, Titch’s dad is there, calm but upset, telling me what Titch had done.

Titch’s dad works at my school, and was responsible for the little boy whose tooth his own son kicked out.   How’s that for complicated?  After I sent the kids home on the bus, Titch’s dad and I went to talk to the assistant principal and I had to recommend suspension.  Titch’s dad understood, and then I emailed Titch’s mom at work, and she called immediately.

Titch’s parents are getting divorced — painfully — and the stress is clearly finally getting to him.  What happened today was the culmination of a difficult, and slightly violent, week for him.  (Choking Harold in the bathroom, hitting Harold at gym class, poking Owen and Ferdinand during meeting, kicking Leo, etc.)

The hard thing is that his face looks happy and calm.  He shows no signs of remorse or concern.  “I was on the climber and he was on the ladder coming up and I didn’t want him up there so I kicked him in the face” as if it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

I started my weekend feeling so tense and upset and sad for Titch and his family.