we are on a roll October 5, 2011

Last year I felt frustrated about my low increase in scores on vocabulary, so I started making vocabulary cards, using Google Images.  (I make two for each word, so that they get used to seeing different images of the same thing for each word.)  So far this year we have introduced one vocabulary word each day.  Some of our words so far:  dolphin, sea horse, zebra, snake….This month we are learning about Fall (and Firefighters), so our words have been leaves, fall, and autumn (the photos for fall and autumn were identical, as they mean the same thing).  We will soon be learning apple, acorn, pumpkin, and scarecrow.

The kids love the cards, and are proud to show off the words they know.  (I mentioned that 16 of my 20 kids speak English as a second language, right?)  In addition to the vocabulary words, we have been learning the colors, with one color celebrated each week.  This week was yellow week, and on the Wednesday of each color week, we all wear the special color.  I looked fetching in my husband’s oversized yellow polo shirt.  I looked particularly fashionable when I topped it off with a crazy yellow crown I made at morning meeting, to inspire the kids to choose the art center today.  It worked — pretty soon the room was full of kids with crazy yellow crowns.

So, we know new vocabulary words, and we all know red, blue, and yellow.  What else?  Well, last week we started learning a letter of the week (I know, I know, many people don’t do that), and so far we know the names and letter sounds for Ss and Oo.  The kids practically fizz with excitement about showing me how they know the letter sounds, using the hand motions I taught them.

And the mornings are going smoothly; they know how to listen, how to follow directions, how to take turns, how to clean up, how to line up, and so on.  They don’t always do those things perfectly, but they are lovely little citizens all the same.

Phew!  One month in, things are looking up.  I’m so glad I’m here, and not back there.

more about Hart & Risley January 11, 2011

NPR did a report on the Meaningful Differences work that Hart and Risley did.  It’s fascinating, and well worth reading.  The article talks about their experiences as educators, trying to teach four year olds vocabulary to put them on par with rich kids — and here’s the depressing part — no matter what they tried, they couldn’t succeed.

(Pause for a minute as Kiri goes off into the other room to do a primal scream.)

I’m back.  Oh, that’s frustrating.  But that was what led them to research the first three years of a child’s life, and the verbal interactions they have with their parents.  The results of that study I have already shared with you.

The good news is that people are using this information to make a difference in the lives of poor children, from birth to three, by helping teach their parents how to have richer — and more — interactions with them.

Now my question is, what can those of us who work with kids who are four do to help?!

what doesn’t belong? and why? January 6, 2011

Today for small groups, we had two independent reading stations, an ABC station, a rhyming station, and a vocabulary station.  I was in charge of vocabulary, and decided to use some picture cards that have four pictures on each, with the question, which one doesn’t belong?  For example, there were four pictures of ice cream, but three were on cones, and the fourth was in a bowl with whipped cream and hot fudge sauce.  And a cherry.

I worked with one group of three, two of whom are native Spanish speakers, and they were puzzled.  One girl told me that the green ice cream was “apple” flavor.  Another pointed out the cherry on the sundae and said, “I like cherry!”  The boy in the group shrugged and said “I don’t know” when I asked him which one didn’t belong.  Then he pointed to the sundae.

“Why is that one different?  Why doesn’t it belong?”

He smiled in a slightly pained, confused sort of way.  ”I don’t know!” he said.  So I ended up pointing out the ice cream cones on the other three, and then all three laughed with comprehension.

I tried another one (three green foods — apple, celery, artichoke — and one red food, a watermelon), and the kids were stumped.  Finally the boy pointed to the watermelon, but he was utterly unable to explain why that was the answer.  My next group struggled as well.  However, both groups thought it was really fun, and didn’t seem to realize that they didn’t quite know how to figure out the question.

The third group consisted of two girls and a boy who all have college-educated parents.  They sat forward eagerly.  I asked my shy girl to do the first card.  ”That one!” she crowed, pointing to the tiger.  ”Because all the rest are farm animals!”  The three of them flew through the cards, taking turns with each one.  They had no trouble at all identifying which picture didn’t belong, and then explaining why.

All of the kids who struggled with this task are lovely children, and some of them are very bright.  They have parents who love them, and take good care of them, and send them to school each day, and show up for parent conferences.  It looks like they just don’t talk to them a lot, and they don’t and ask them why questions.

So our list of goals for the year, of skills we need to work on, just keeps getting longer.

meaningful differences January 5, 2011

Wow, yesterday’s post certainly touched a nerve.  That was the most hits I ever got on my blog, and the most comments.  So thank you, everyone, for being part of the conversation.

So the question is, how do preschool teachers strike a balance between helping their disadvantaged students get a great education and a leg up, and remaining true to early childhood principles without pushing an inappropriate curriculum on them?  At least, I think that is the question.  It’s a little hard to put into one brief sentence.  Or maybe that’s the glass of wine I had with dinner…

The whole thing brings me back to my favorite book on education, Meaningful Differences, by Hart and Risley.  I’ve written about it before, here (referring to an article about the book), here (talking to my 1 year old niece and nephew), and here (talking with my nephew at age 2).   Here’s what the publisher has to say:

Their painstaking study began by recording each month — for 2-1/2 years — one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. Rare is a database of this quality. “Remarkable,” says Assistant Secretary of Education Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, of the findings: By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families. Between professional and welfare parents, there was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating this verbal interaction to a year, a child in a professional family would hear 11 million words while a child in a welfare family would hear just 3 million.

Did you get that one amazing sentence, about how the vocabularies of the three year olds in the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families?  When the kids then get to kindergarten, the poor kids have vocabularies of about 2,000 words.  Pretty good, huh?  Well, not when you compare that to the vocabularies of the professionals’ kids — they go to kindergarten with 20,000 words at their disposal.

That makes me sick to my stomach.  Then it makes my blood boil.  And after that, I roll up my sleeves and determine that MY students will have as many rich experiences and conversations as possible.  I do all I can to talk to them and listen to them and teach them about conversations, questions, answers, and discussion.  The inequality they face as a result of their families’ economic circumstances just gives me more reason to do everything I can to get them ready for kindergarten on an even ground with the more advantaged kids they will meet there.

So please keep in mind that I do not teach in the suburbs.  I don’t teach rich kids.  My view of preschool is shaped by my experiences in my urban district.  If I were to teach the kids of college-educated parents, I might have a different view entirely.

Although, knowing how opinionated and stubborn I am, maybe not!

needy December 8, 2010

So I’ve got two students receiving special education services, one of whom also receives speech.  I’ve got another student who is about to start receiving special education services, and she also receives counseling (we have an on-site counseling center).  I’ve got a fourth student who will be referred for special ed soon, and who will probably qualify, and will also probably qualify for speech services.  I’ve got a fifth student who is about to start receiving counseling, and a sixth who has been referred.  I’ve got a seventh student who I will refer for speech, and an eighth student who is in the intervention/documentation part of the speech referral process.

Whew!  I love this class.  They are sweet and special.  And young.  And they need a lot of help with their communication skills — conversation, vocabulary, articulation.  And they are….a bit needy.

I will do what I can.

what did you have for breakfast? and other conversational quagmires December 5, 2010

I may have mentioned that this is a very young class.  I’m still adjusting to their relative lack of maturity, and their difficulties with conversation, vocabulary, discussion, and questioning.  Here’s a little example.

Bunny comes up from breakfast.  She has some issues with speech, so I ask her, “what did you have for breakfast?”

Bunny smiles at me, blankly.

“You were just downstairs eating breakfast.  Can you tell me what you ate?”

“A cupcake?” she ventures.

“Well, they don’t have cupcakes for breakfast.  Do you mean a muffin?”

“Yeah, a muffin.”

“What else did you eat?” I ask.

She shows me her thumb and forefinger, making a little circle.  I’m at a loss, so I suggest we go downstairs to the cafeteria to see what is being offered.  I desperately want Bunny to learn more words.

In the cafeteria, we join the other kids from our class at “our” table, where they are sitting with our two wonderful 8th grade helpers.  I tell the older girls what I’m up to, and suggest that they talk to the children about what they are eating each day, so the little ones can strengthen their vocabularies.  When I look at the food, I discover that Bunny ate grapes, so I teach her the word for grapes, thinking to myself, didn’t we all work on this word last month during our farm and food unit?

I turn to Deer, and ask her, “what are you eating for breakfast, sweetie?”

Deer looks at me like, well, like a deer in headlights.  She is even more limited in her vocabulary than Bunny (both of whom, by the way, are native English speakers).  She has a bagel in her hand, but has no word for it.

I turn to Froggy, who is also eating a bagel.  He’s had some developmental delays, but seems worlds ahead of Deer.  I think he will be exited from special ed services within the year.  Anyway, Froggy grins at me broadly and announces, “a bagel!!”

“Deer, what are you eating?”

“A bagel?” she says, tentatively.

“Yes!”  I say.  ”You are eating a bagel.  Yum!”

Later that morning, I am working on a gingerbread man project with Deer and Froggy, and decide to try to have a conversation with Deer while she is working.  After a few attempts go nowhere, I ask her, “What did you have for breakfast this morning?”

She looks at me, frozen.  I turn to Froggy, again.  ”Froggy, what did you have for breakfast?”

“A bagel!” he says, happily.

Now it’s Deer’s turn.  ”What did you eat for breakfast today?”

She thinks about it.  ”Chicken.”

so many different ways to fail May 11, 2010

I suppose I could have titled this post everyone has different strengths (and weaknesses), or maybe nobody can do it all (but we should die trying).

But right now I just feel like a failure.  I went through our portfolios to see how the kids are doing with colors, shapes, recognizing numbers, counting to ten with one-to-one correspondence, counting to 30 (or higher), and understanding concepts like up/down, same/different, over/under, and first/last.

Sure, plenty of kids were doing fine.  But a surprisingly large number still do not know all four basic shapes (circle, square, triangle, rectangle), cannot name all the numbers 0-10, or count to 30 (which is our district’s expectation).  The child with the sort of spectrum-like behavior still does not know the number thirteen, so when counting, I have to say this kid can only count to twelve accurately (you mark the number before their first mistake as the number they can count to).  In the fall it was twelve, and in the winter it was twelve, and now in the spring — still twelve!

Pumpkin can count to ten (yay!) and knows all his colors, but he still doesn’t know the shapes or numbers.  Apple can’t do anything — no shapes, numbers, colors, concepts, patterning, anything.  Of course, I am going to refer her to the evaluation team to see if she’s special ed (ya think?!).

We have another assessment coming up for vocabulary, rhyming, and alliteration, and I shudder to think how they will do on those.  So now I feel like the rest of the year is going to be a scramble to catch up.  Yes, we can write stories and sound out words.  Several of my kids can read and write independently.  But for so many to be lost on the basic skills makes me feel frustrated and sad.  And like a failure.

Apple’s progress May 3, 2010

Apple is the sweet baby of our class.  She spoke no English at the beginning of the year, and was barely comprehensible in Spanish, either.  She knew no colors or numbers or shapes or letters in either language.  She said nothing, but just smiled a lot.  She had coping skills, and was always in the right place at the right time, gamely trying to do whatever it was we were doing.

Then she fell in love with me, and I started getting daily (even hourly) hugs from her.  She started to come out of her shell, and she started speaking English, one word at a time.  She got excited about writing and started writing me daily love letters, filled with her writing-like scribbles (that went left to right, top to bottom).

At writer’s workshop she understood that she was to tell stories with her drawings.  At first she drew a lot of pictures of her family (her mom was always complete with boobs and nipples), and then she started to branch off.  Now she draws pictures of stories about food that she has eaten with her family.

She knows the color purple.  Miss Slinger taught her how to write her name a few weeks ago.  She can cut with scissors.  She can count to five in English.  She can say sentences with three or four words.

And she is still always happy.  She is our little ray of sunshine and I just love her.

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, continued March 27, 2009

The children are starting to understand what I’m trying to do with the Word Wizard poster.  I wrote on it the three words for this week — disappointed, excited, and lonely — and then we made tally marks every time we used (or heard someone use) any of the words.

Ruby got it first.  Almost every day in Morning Meeting she has raised her hand to say something like, “I’m excited to go to a meeting with my daddy,” or “I’m excited to go to my Grandma’s house.”  Miss Slinger and I have, unfortunately, had several opportunities to say, “I’m very disappointed in your behavior.”

But the best of all is a little boy we’ll call Russell (for Russell the Sheep, who can’t get to sleep), whose mother sent me an email to let me know that Russell said “I’m disappointed that Daddy didn’t give my little brother enough salad” at dinner the other night.  She didn’t know where he got that word until she saw the letter in his backpack about our Word Wizard words of the week.