I don’t know about any other teachers out there, but when I first started back teaching in the beginning of August I was concerned with things like how am I going to teach this new group of kids? What are they going to be like? What will I do with them all day? How will I deal with the parents? WHAT am I actually going to teach them? I think these are questions that many teachers ask themselves. The root of it all is: am I going to be effective with these students? It’s a tough job being a teacher, we’re hard on our students, but we’re harder on ourselves. It was really neat to get to sit down and do some serious catharsis and relive my highs and lows of each day and get into the thick of it with how I interact with my students on a daily basis and WHAT I actually end up teaching them.
The first thing I noticed is that children have a unique way of telling us what they need. In my case, with a room full of 4 and 5 year olds, they repeat A LOT of things, “my favorite color is pink and purple”, “I miss my mom”, “I don’t like fish sticks”, “can you read my book?” and it doesn’t end there. My favorite repeating phrase I’ve heard so far this year is, “Angry Birds Star Wars 2 is coming out on September 19”. I heard this so many times from one student in particular, I thought I was going to have to ban the phrase “Angry Birds” from my classroom.
What these little ones are really getting at is, it’s all about me. What is important to me? What does that have to do with me? Why are we doing this activity if I don’t like it? Chip Wood puts it this way in his book Yardsticks, “five-year-olds are not selfish, but they are at the center of their own universe and often find it hard to see the world from any other point of view” (2007, p. 58). After working with 4 and 5 year olds for the past three and a half years, I can say I whole-heartedly agree with Chip Wood on this. One of my goals this year is to use the interests of my students to better meet them where they are at and create engaging learning opportunities that are mostly led and created by them. I want to create spaces for them to experiment with the, physical, social/emotional, cognitive parts of their learning, all the while focusing on what their minds are most interested in.
What I have learned from taking a critical look at the environment of my classroom is that I was often doing whatever I wanted to do, without regard to what my student’s interests were. I wasn’t blatantly disregarding their interests, I just didn’t know what they were. After getting some excellent advice from my coach, I went down a deep dark path that many have traveled before. I got the Angry Birds Star Wars app--and quite frankly, I’ll probably never be the same. My first thought after playing this addicting game was, “5 year olds can do this?!”. After playing the game for a few rounds I began to develop my skills a bit more and understand the abilities of my birds, how I could leverage the slingshots aim, use the trajectory to destroy structures and so on. Now we’re talking some real physical science here--hey, if this is educational I can use this in my classroom!
You can’t imagine the excitement of the majority of my class when I told them we were going to make Angry Birds come to life in our very own school! We spent 2 days making our own birds and pigs out of ping pong balls and building a useable slingshot. I invited my most enthusiastic student (who just so happened to know the exact date when the new Angry Birds Star Wars 2 game was coming out) to come to the Angry Birds small group first. Now, it wasn’t perfect and conflicts arose within the group--but we built some structures for those menacing pigs to hide in and flung our birds into them. All the students experimented with the slingshot and how they could leverage different rubber band lengths to increase speed. Some students even figured out that if they put something heavy inside of the ping pong balls it would have a bigger impact.
While we were having some serious success garnering student interests and creating learning opportunities that were engaging to children---I was having a tough time correcting some negative behavior from certain students. What I noticed in particular was that there were very specific times and specific students that were struggling in conflict with their peers. I also noticed that my answer, more often than not was to remove a student from a situation. Often times, that seems the most convenient and wise thing to do. I’m starting to realize how much that is my go-to for particular students who I don’t think will really solve their conflict by talking.
In Becky Bailey’s Conscious Discipline, she says, “in order for children to learn how to behave properly, they must be taught” (2000, p. 13). What am I teaching a child when I remove them from the beloved blocks center because they REALLY wanted the block their friend was using and decided to take it? I think I’m teaching them that I have the power to take something from them if I don’t like what I see. I think I’m teaching them that I don’t value their feelings. More importantly, I’m not helping them see how the conflict they are having could help them relate to a friend and learn to be a problem solver. I need to model positive interactions with them when conflicts to arise (because they will!). This is something I really would like to take a step back on and gain some perspective on the power of modeling preferred, kind, respectful, and honoring behavior.
