“why do we learn letters?” November 30, 2009

Today when we were reviewing the letters and sounds we know so far, a little girl we’ll call Tomato raised her hand.

“Why do we learn letters?” she asked.  (English is her second language, I might add.)

I was about to start answering, or to find another child to answer, when I realized from the grin on her face that it had been a rhetorical question.  I let her answer it herself.

“So we can learn how to read!” Tomato said triumphantly.

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We were walking back from Gym when I heard Chutney muttering.

“P…Pa….Pat…”

She was sounding out the word “Patterns” on the kindergarten display of patterns in the hallway.

snapshots of the next day November 5, 2009

This morning I put on my lovely new red coat and went out to meet the buses as they arrived.  When bus 3 came, I caught Cherry and Chutney as they got off and had them wait with me.  When all the kids were gone, the driver got off, and I told her that I was their teacher, and that we were there to apologize to her for their behavior last week.

“Cherry, please repeat this after me.  I’m sorry I stood up on the bus.”

Cherry hung her head.  “I’m sorry I stood up on the bus.”

“I’m sorry I wouldn’t listen to you.”

“I’m sorry I wouldn’t listen to you.”

“I’m sorry I used bad words.”

“I’m sorry I used bad words.”

“It will never happen again.”

“It will never happen again, ” Cherry promised.

I went through the same routine with Chutney,  minus the part about the bad words.  The driver at this point was looking really surprised and also pleased.  I don’t think she ever meets her bus riders’ teachers.

I found out her name (let’s call her Maria), introduced her formally to the girls, and explained that it is her job to keep them safe.  It is their job to be respectful to her, and to listen to her, so that she can keep them safe.  I said that their behavior last week was unacceptable, and if it ever happened again, Maria would let me know and I would give them a consequence in the classroom.

I held their hands and we went back to class, talking excitedly about our third reading of Knuffle Bunny.  I am hopeful that we will not have a repeat of that behavior.  They really are smart and wonderful girls.

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At centers time Cherry chose the reading corner.  She read and re-read Knuffle Bunny out loud; she has memorized the whole damn thing.  I think I need to call her mom and compliment her — she’s the mom who told me that when she found out she was pregnant, she started buying children’s books, and now Cherry has FOUR HUNDRED books at home.  You can tell this is a well-read child.

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Plum was absent, so I guess she really was still sick yesterday.  Zucchini had a wonderful time in blocks today, and no pee accidents.  He kept building towers and showing me — “Look, cylinders!  And this is a cylinder, too!”  My new student wore a coat to school today.  The room was clean, but when Zucchini opened the block shelf it was a disaster (I, in my usual anal-retentive way, have a specific place for each block to go).  I suppose I will have to visit Miss Mellow’s class again to explain how to clean up the blocks, as I forgot to mention that yesterday.

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We finished the day with our third reading of Knuffle Bunny, where the children reconstruct the story and tell it to me, and then we got to watch the video, using my video data projector.  It was wonderful, and a great way to end the morning.

I love this class October 28, 2009

We walked to the library today for preschool storytime.  When I had the kids on the carpet in our room to remind them about walking safely, holding hands, crossing the street, and all that, Cherry raised her hand.

“We can listen to the cars say ‘RRR!’” she said.  (We learned the /r/ sound this week, with a story about getting in a race car, turning the key in the ignition, and hearing the engine go “RRRR”!  The hand motion for R is turning a key.)

“You’re right, ” I said.  I’d never had a child make that connection before.  “We can listen for cars going ‘RRR’.  We can also look for the letter R and the other letters we know on signs.”

So we started walking and pretty soon they were seeing S, M, A, R, and T everywhere.  (Yeah, somehow the letters I’ve taught them so far spell out SMART.  That was totally unplanned, but wonderfully appropriate.)  I have never had a class like this one.  They really listen to what I teach them, and then they talk about it while playing, or walking, or drawing.

We got to the library in plenty of time, and my class was beautifully behaved, as usual.  The story theme was monsters.

I crossed my legs (the grownups were in chairs) and Pumpkin noticed my foot near him.  He turned and gave me a beatific smile.

He held my foot lovingly for the rest of storytime.

And when we got back to school, I gave them a long recess and everyone pretended to be a monster.

back to mentoring September 18, 2009

This year I am once again mentoring/coaching other teachers.  I know there are plenty of ways that I can improve, and one thing I’m trying to do is to be more organized about my time, and communicate more often with my teachers.  I’ve started sending out a weekly email with my schedule, and whose classrooms I will visit, and when.  The teachers have responded well to it and a few have even said thanks, which tells me I didn’t communicate this sort of thing to them well enough last year.

The first week I went to the kindergarten classrooms, and was delighted to see that the well-deserving K teachers have a more mellow group.  Last year and the year before were somewhat challenging (two years ago at this time the kindergartners were like wild wolf puppies, tumbling and wrestling on the floor, in all three classrooms, and last year was only a bit better), but the K kids I saw were listening to their teachers and participating in their storytimes.

Then this past week I went to first grade.  One teacher was putting tape on the floor in three rows, to mark where the kids should sit, which is an idea he got from me last year.  I was pleased to see that at least once, I did something useful!  His class was mellow, but the other two were more challenging.  My job is to assist teachers in improving the quality of their teaching in general, and to help them with readers’ workshop and writers’ workshop in particular.  Behavior management is not part of my brief, but sometimes that has to be done before the teachers can settle in to teach reading or writing.

Next week I’ll make my visits to second grade, and then I’ll be visiting on a regular schedule to observe and coach.

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?

successes and failures June 19, 2009

At the end of the year I returned to the children’s assessment portfolios, and once again asked them questions about letters, sounds, numbers, colors, shapes, etc.  Miss Slinger did her final assessment measuring vocabulary, rhyming, and alliteration.  And then I looked at all the results and thought about them.

You know, when it’s the end of the year, you realize it’s too late to have done anything differently!

On the bright side, I rock at teaching letters and sounds.  Everyone did really well with recognizing capital and lowercase letters, and in identifying letter sounds.  I think most of my class knows at least 18 capitals, 18 lowercase, and 15 sounds.  Many of them know all 26 in each category, and even my special education students did really well.  So I feel good about sending them off to kindergarten, ready to go with learning how to read.

On the not-as-bright side, while my kids did okay with rhyming and alliteration, several of them did not meet the benchmark.  I do teach rhyming and alliteration, but not as a daily routine, the way I do with the letters.  And I have to admit, I’m kind of haphazard about fitting in my phonemic awareness stuff.

When I look back on the year, and look ahead to the new year, I definitely know what I want to improve.  I did a great job with my read-alouds and book discussions two years ago, but not as well this past year.  I’d like to teach phonemic awareness skills in a systematic, logical progression.  I’d like to teach more content with each theme — maybe even do something on the first day (what do we know about zoos?  what do we WANT to know?) and the last day (what did we learn about zoos?).  And I’m still struggling to teach science, so I’m thinking about doing it sort of indirectly, with more nature and outdoor time.

word wizards March 24, 2009

Yesterday flew by in a rush, and I never got to story time.  So today we read On Monday When It Rained, and I put three words on our new Word Wizard poster:

• disappointed
• excited
• lonely

First, though I did a vocabulary pretest.  I gave the children trays to use as lapboards, and papers numbered 1-6.  By each number there was a happy sun picture, and a sad cloud picture.  I said, “If this sentence makes sense, circle the sun.  If it doesn’t make sense, circle the cloud.”  Then I said six sentences, like “When my mom said we were going to the cool new playground, I was excited.”

The whole thing was crazy.  I felt like the assessment itself wasn’t very developmentally appropriate.  These guys are FOUR and they’ve never taken tests before.  Understanding if a sentence made sense was hard enough, but figuring out how to fill out the sheet was really hard.  Miss Slinger was trying not to laugh, and I was trying not to cry.

However, I’m still glad I did it.  When we read the book, we talked about what those three words mean, and how we’re going to keep track of every time we hear someone using those words.  We’ve already got four tally marks on the poster (Miss Slinger:  “I’m so disappointed that you are making so much noise in the hallway.  Oh, thank you for being quiet.  I’m so excited that you were doing such a good job listening to me.”)  And at the end of the week, we’ll do the post-test, and I can see if we’ve made any growth.

I need to figure out a good way to measure if children have learned a particular vocabulary word.  Any ideas?

“was there blood?!” March 9, 2009

Today I sat with Ruby at the writing center. After she was done coloring some bears, I asked her if she’d like to tell me a bear story, and that I would write it down, and later, read it to the class.  She agreed with enthusiasm.  Here is her story, as well as I can remember it:

“The bears were walking.  Then they saw a store.  There were people in it.  The bears ate all the people.  And the kids were all safe.  Then the bears saw a strange house.  There were robbers in it.  The bears went in and got caught.  But then they got away and they ate all the robbers.  The end.”

This story had an electrifying effect on my class, when I read it to them at storytime.

Owen said, his eyes gleaming, “Was there blood?!”

“No,” I said firmly, “there was no mention of blood.”

I changed the subject.  “Tomorrow I’ll be at the writing center if you’d like me to write down your bear story.”

“Mine is going to be scary!” said Owen.

“Mine is going to be really scary!” said Swimmy.

I think I will be surrounded by boys and scary bear stories tomorrow.  I can’t wait.

pro athletes visiting schools February 18, 2009

As I came in to work this morning, looking at all the favorite book door decorations, and thinking about how I have failed to organize anything else for I Love to Read Month, my mind thought back to a school I worked at long ago.

One day, we had some pro athletes come to school to talk to our kindergartners about reading.  The memory still rankles.

My class had a young man come in to speak who apparently had no real idea of why he was there.  He used the occasion to complain about the leeches in his personal life who were always trying to get money from him, now that he was in the big leagues and making the big bucks.

I’m sure he went to college along the way to pro sports, but it hadn’t seemed to have made much impact.  He rambled on about his personal problems, without any awareness that the five year olds in front of him couldn’t understand anything he was saying.

My students had really hard lives, and really huge needs.  This was the class that played “Call 911, my boyfriend is coming over to kill me” in the house corner.  And here we were, stuck, wasting our time listening to the inane ramblings of an inarticulate, overpaid, undereducated man-boy.

So no, you will not catch me organizing a visit from athletes to talk to students about reading.  Instead, you will find me actually reading to the children.

More wild things February 4, 2009

This is I Love to Read Month — and I’m in charge.  Since I was sick the last two weeks of January, I didn’t plan much.  We are, however, doing a decorate-your-door contest.

Each class has decorated their door to show their favorite book; the judging is today and I will find out tomorrow who has won.  The winning classrooms get gift certificates to Target for the teachers, and a popcorn party for the kids.

We did Where The Wild Things Are, obviously.  Miss Slinger drew a wonderful Max in the lower right corner, and a few of the children helped her paint the grass and the tree.  I sat at the art table and had the children draw wild things.  They turned out really well, I thought.