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.

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?

Farmer Duck March 19, 2009

So, have you ever tried to discuss books with a class of urban four year olds, and found that the only emotion words they know are sad, mad, and happy?

We read Farmer Duck today for the second time, and so this time I wanted to ask what the secondary characters were thinking and feeling.  “How did the other animals feel, when they saw Duck was ’sleepy and weepy and tired?’” I asked.

“Sad,” they all said.  No one could say much more than that.  I had to do some modeling of a think-aloud:  “Well, I’m thinking that they must be pretty upset.  They love the duck, and they probably think it isn’t fair for the farmer to stay all day in bed.  They could be feeling frustrated with this terrible situation.”

Then when I asked them, “What is the farmer thinking right now?!” on the page where he wakes up to find the cow, hens, and sheep under his bed, bouncing it around, and making loud noises.

“Sad,” they all said.  WHAT?!  I couldn’t get more than that out of them, so finally I told them, “You know, if I woke up all of a sudden and my bed was bouncing and there were farm animals in my room and they were yelling at me, I’d be really CONFUSED.”

I have decided that we will start studying vocabulary in a more intentional way, and that we will start with emotion words:  upset, angry, proud, excited, worried, embarrassed, confused.  Definitely confused.  I’m going to pick books that deal explicitly with moods and feelings, and pick three words each week to highlight and post on the Word Wizard poster I just made this morning.  We’ll write the words on the poster, refer to it daily, and record each time we hear someone using one of the words, or we ourselves use one in conversation.

Maybe in a few weeks our book discussions can go a little deeper.

Mole February 5, 2009

Princess, on arriving at school:  Mrs. X, I have a mole in my tummy!

Teacher:  A mole?  Is it a mole ON your tummy?

Princess:  Yeah!  I have a mole on my tummy!

Teacher:  That’s okay.  I have moles, too.

Princess:  There’s a mole in my tummy, and it hurts!

Teacher:  Sweetie, do you have an owie on your tummy?

Princess:  Yeah!  No.  It’s just a mole!

Teacher, confused:  Well, if it’s just a mole, then you’ve probably had it your whole life.  If it’s an owie, it will get better soon.

Princess:  Okay!  [Princess always speaks in exclamation marks.]  But there really is a mole in my tummy!

Teacher:  Do you want to show it to me?

Princess, who has been playing with her shirt and lifting it up and down:  No, I don’t want to show you my tummy!  [laughing]

Mrs. X., to Miss Slinger:  I really wish that child would learn how to speak in coherent sentences.

Talking to toddlers December 29, 2008

At a science museum today with my two year old nephew (and various and sundry other relatives), I held his hand and showed him the antelope exhibit.

“See, that’s an antelope.  Can you say that?”

“Annalope!”  We walked to the next exhibit.

“Oh, this is a different kind of antelope.”

“Anonner one!  And anonner one!”  He pointed.  Then he asked, “What’s he eating?”

“He’s eating the grass.”

“Annalope eating da grass.”

I got bored of all the antelope displays, and looked ahead.  “Ooh, would you like to see a lion?”

“Wion!”  So we moved on to the lion display.  “Wion!  Anonner one!”

“Yes, there are more lions.  Shall we count them?  One, two, three, four.  There are four lions.”

“Four wions.”  He paused, and looked at the lions with interest.  “Toes.”

“Yes,” I said, “lions do have toes.  In their paws.”

“Toes in dere paws.”

And so on.  Later, walking back to the car with my brother-in-law, I told him how wonderful it was to talk to his son and teach him things, and how it made my kind of angry at the same time, to think of all the other two year olds who are not being talked to.

“No one is talking to them, or listening to them.  Their parents think of toddlers as sort of overgrown babies who can’t really learn or do anything.  They yell at them, tell them No! or Stop that! or Be Quiet!, they feed them, dress them, and they love them, but they don’t talk to them.  And so they don’t really learn how to talk all that well…..And then they end up in my class.”

I told my brother-in-law about the most important study/book about education and poverty, Meaningful Differences, by Hart and Risley.  Children from families in poverty are talked to so much less than children in families with professional parents that they arrive in kindergarten with a word deficit in the thousands, having heard millions of fewer words in their little life times.

“So, some kids are already screwed when they’re three?” my brother-in-law asked.

And unfortunately, some of them are.  Those of us who are their teachers need to do as much as we can to provide them with rich experiences and lots of vocabulary to try to address the word gap. 

And it sure would be nice if teachers and policy-makers and people who care about the achievement gap could figure out a way to encourage more parents to talk to their toddlers.

Talking to small children July 8, 2008

I am back from a long vacation, the first part of which was spent at the beach with my husband’s family, and the second part of which was in a big city with my sister and her family. 

I had the opportunity first to observe my sister-in-law talking with my one-year-old niece, and then later my sister talking with my one-year-old nephew, and it occurred to me again how lucky most middle- and upper-middle class children are, to be born into families where their parents just naturally talk to them. 

My niece doesn’t have a lot of words yet, but she is very expressive, and can usually make known her wishes and dislikes and feelings.  Her parents talk to her all day long, and they listen to her, too.  She hears a ton of vocabulary, and because she is treated as a person who can understand, eventually, she does understand.  Her older sister was counting to twenty accurately in both English and Spanish before she turned three, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the little one turns out to be just as smart.

My nephew is a few months older, and has more words, although this past weekend I had a conversation with him that mostly consisted of him pointing at various things and saying “eee, eee, eee” in many different intonations.  He clearly knew what he was talking about, even if I didn’t, and I enjoyed his confidence in communication.  One night at dinner he didn’t want to eat, so my sister and brother-in-law told him, “no dinner, no dessert.”  They had a little parental discussion about whether or not he understood this concept, and decided that while he understood many other “if, then” scenarios, he hadn’t figured out this one.  But they decided to stick to it anyway, since he will eventually understand this rule through experience. 

My younger son took it on himself to teach his little cousin new words, and succeeded.  He taught him silly words (“boopdee”) and useful words (“cookie”), and my nephew probably ended up adding 6 words to his vocabulary over the weekend.  He even said “airplane” for the first time (“eee-peen!”).

I kept thinking about my darling O., from this past year’s class, who arrived in November at the age of four with an almost shocking delay in his speaking ability.  He’s got a mother who loves him very much, and who is very attentive, positive, and caring in her interactions with him.  However, she is living in poverty (when he started in my class, he was being bused from the homeless shelter), she has two other little ones at home, and she has a whole family of older children who live in Chicago.  I would wager a guess that she did not grow up with college-educated parents, and that no one talked to her a whole lot when she was little, so she doesn’t talk a whole lot with O. and his siblings.

O. learned a lot of vocabulary and conversational skills over the year, but to me it never felt like enough.  I keep thinking about the Meaningful Differences study (which I wrote about here), and how vast the vocabulary gap is between children who grow up in poverty, and children who grow up in either working-class or professional families.

The question is, how do we get the word out to the parents in poverty, about how to talk to their children in the first five years of their lives?