Connections: Engaging our students and creating purpose in the small things!

Small group on predicting if objects will sink or float

As I look back over my past month, (only 15 school days in November!), I’m blown away at how much I’ve noticed and how much I’ve seen my students grow or change.  In some ways, there appears to be so much positive growth with my students and I’m already starting to envision them in kindergarten next year and it makes my heart ache! In other ways, I feel like some of my students aren’t advancing fast enough and it makes me nervous to think about them in kindergarten next year.  I know we have so much time left together and that they can grow A LOT in the next few months, but time flies by so quick sometimes, I wonder what we actually will accomplish that can be measured by the experts.  

As I look back at my highs, I’ve noticed a trend that I’ve seen all year long with my students, which is when I offer them engaging small groups they are interested in and respond so well to them! If it is a learning opportunity that they actually want to do, there is no problem getting them involved in the activity and their own learning, thus illustrating Frank Smith’s point in, The Book of Learning and Forgetting that, “Learning is not hard work.” (2002, p. 5).  The more I think about my students, and the fact that they are 4 and 5 years old--I completely agree with this notion.  Children are learning ALL THE TIME and if they are learning that learning is fun because it appeals to them and it’s what they want to do--well then I think that’s exactly what we should be doing as educators.  This is no easy feat though in our field.  We are in classrooms with anywhere from 20-30 students all at various developmental stages and interest levels, not to mention varying cultural and experiential backgrounds.  To reach all students at any given time is almost impossible, at least for me.  And I’m encouraged when the majority of my students are interested in what we are doing at the time.  If I find that only a few are uninterested, it just clues me in that I need to keep searching to find what impassions them.  

“The morning routine sets the tone for the entire day” --Becky Bailey (Conscious Discipline, 2000, p. 52)

Which leads me to my lows for this month. Although it was a short month, I noticed that so many days my low was our morning meeting time.  Our morning meeting used to be such a joy--a time of sharing our feelings, getting our wiggles our, talking about the weather, enjoying a nice book, and engaging in some large group literacy.  However, it seems my students have outgrown our simple routines and are in need of some different structures for our morning meeting.  It’s been difficult because I thought we had a good thing going, ya know!? But my kiddos have started to clue me in that something needs to change.  They need more time to connect with one another on a deeper and physical level besides just sitting on the carpet and talking about how they’re feeling in this morning.  They need a way to release all the pent up energy and wiggles that are dying to get out.  They need to connect meaning and purpose behind talking about what month, day and year it is.  They need to understand why we even need to talk about the weather each day.  I think I’ve lost this notion a little bit and want to find a way to connect my students to rituals and experiences that mean something to themselves. Becky Bailey has a lot to say about morning meeting, “Circle time and morning meetings allow teachers and students to start the day the brain smart way.  The goal is to unite as one group, connect with each other through various greeting activities, disengage the stress response as children and teachers transition from home to school, and commit to a wonderful day of learning and caring for each other” (2000, p. 52).  

Although I want to extend my highs and continue offering these high interest learning opportunities for my students, I also want to decrease the lows and make our morning meeting meaningful and fun again! If you have any ideas of how you do  your morning meeting please share!!! 

Ladybugs, Part II

"Every day the kids come up with new and interesting information, often things we don’t know anything about.  They tend to take their work further than we could ever imagine, particularly with the art”

 While reading through the next few chapters of Ladybugs, Tornadoes, and Swirling Galaxies, I’ve honestly been incredibly challenged by Brad and Anne’s style of teaching.  There is so much emphasis on student-led and child-centered.  In some ways it seems like the children are in charge of the classroom! And the more I ruminate on this idea, the more I’m convinced, that’s exactly as it should be. I’ve often asked myself during the first semester of grad school, “Whose classroom and whose education is it?” If we look at our education system, there is a distinct lack of control from the student’s point of view.  I’m glad this is changing, and I think it gives teachers a lot of freedom to actually give freedom to the students. 

A few things that I connected with in Ladybugs this go around has been this idea of questioning.  Teachers modeling questioning, and students mirroring back this inquiry process of constantly questioning the world they live in.  I realize that I ask my students a lot of questions--ALL THE TIME.  How did you do that? Why did you do that? What exactly is that? Or my favorite, the statement that is really a question, “tell me more about that...”.  I love asking them questions, and having them figure out how to articulate information to me.  I love when they ask me a question, because I usually just ask them another question right back.  “Ms. Harrelson, why did you make the library different?” “Hmm, why do you think I would make it different?” And having them think about my thinking; I know they are only four and five years old, but they know so much! I also love when they ask me a question about another student, “why is so and so crying?” “hmm, I don’t know, why don’t you ask them.” Having them use their peers to get information is so powerful and makes them become seekers of knowledge for their own purposes.  

Another idea I connected with in the book were several strategies they used for helping children start their inquiry projects.  They suggested using lines for the student’s words to go in and having them draw first before their writing.  We are already doing this in our classroom.  I took Brad and Anne’s idea of putting yellow lines for each word in a sentence and then writing your sentence to emphasize space between words and anticipating the next word in a sentence.  My students use this technique to help write the morning message and on their own work--even if they are just writing random strings of letters.  After a coaching session with Dr. Lynch, she encouraged me to emphasize the importance of having students draw their ideas first before trying to write about them (because almost all of my students are prephonemic).  I’ve been encouraging this with my students over the past 2 months--we come up with our ideas first and then draw the ideas, then if we want, we can dictate to the teacher or try to sound out the words or labels we would like on our work.  This is more effective with my Pre-K students because they are using their art abilities to make their ideas come alive, and then later we are connecting text to the drawing and talking about how our words match the picture.  

Several things that I read in Ladybugs began to point my thinking new directions. Brad and Anne talk about the children’s own inquiry process and work and how when they are doing this, it might look different than a lot of classrooms,  “this is all natural. The kids are everywhere, spread out with their work, engaged in their thinking, working a their own pace” (Buhrow and Garcia, ). I often look around at my classroom and think, hmm, it looks a little chaotic in here.  But then I look at what the kids are doing, and I’ve got some dressing up in dramatic play and there’s stuff EVERYWHERE, but they’re sitting down and writing or drawing about what they are pretending. And then I look in the block area, and I have kids making plans for the secret hideout they’re about to build, and I look in art and kids are taping and stapling papers together to make books.  It’s fascinating.  The room might not be ascetically pleasing to the type A organizational guru--but actual, authentic learning is taking place.  This has been a recent tension point with my administration, because they expect to come in and see the room neat and orderly, as if that’s how a human brain works, or especially a 5 year old brain works!  And again, I think--this is why our educational system is in such turmoil as it is.  Us adults are always trying to control a child’s learning--but if we let it happen naturally and we make space for the chaos and worry about the clean up later, well we could just see something fantastic take place inside our seemingly messy classrooms.  

Finally, the ideas that are still circling in side of my mind are these thoughts and ideas of language framing and modeling for the children.  I realized after reading though these chapters, that I ask the kids so many times to tell me what they notice--most recently it was that we did our morning message words in a pattern (suggested from a Pre-K teacher that did a seminar recently).  I realized that I ask my students to tell me things they notice, but I’m not necessarily modeling what they should be noticing.  Without doing this, my students began to notice some really cool things that I couldn’t even have predicted they would notice about our morning message.  After all the children clued in on the ab pattern on the board, they were all fixating on it and only talking about the pattern, even though I wanted them to notice other things.  And without any provocation for this, one student piped up and said, “well I notice there are a lot of M’s in the message and I want to count the M’s”.  To me this was so beautiful, this little girl was engaging in text in a way I didn’t intentionally ask her to. 

Who has the POWER?!

This past month has been a struggle, to say the least.  There have been days that I’ve left school thinking, “what just happened?”.  Some days I think this because it was a really beautiful day and the kids just all got along, or were able to really get a specific strategy or skill I was teaching.  Some days I don’t know what happened because it was a really hard day for the kids conflict wise, or just because I, myself, was struggling.  Either way, the really beautiful thing I find about teaching is that it truly is new everyday. And with each new day comes a new wonderful, fascinating, spectacular thing as well as a difficult, horrible, tiring thing. It’s exhausting and exhilarating to be a teacher, because we are always going from the valleys to the mountains.  To that point, it’s exhausting and exhilarating to be a kid too! They travel up and down with us.   

As I look back at my highs from this month, I have to say that I’m most proud of how conflict is being handled by my students.  Of course I’m proud of their writing, reading, and math skills.  But I LOVE watching them have meaningful moments with each other and use those negotiating skills.  Ever since a class meeting we had for Language and Literacy, I’ve been ruminating over this idea of “Who has the power in my classroom?”.  Am I the teacher with all the skills and proficiencies and my students are just so lucky to have me to guide them? OR, am I the teacher who gets to support these brilliant, little capable children and scaffold their conflict resolution skills? To be honest, this month there has been an internal tension between these two ideas.  I have been that teacher that “looses control” and gets frustrated and yells at my students.  And I have been that understanding, reassuring presence that lets them make mistakes and gently leads them into proper negotiating.  

One of the things I personally started doing, at the advice of Dr. Lynch after a coaching session was trying to empower those students that weren’t exhibiting any of the negotiating skills that they need to be effective conflict resolvers.  One of my students (Edgar) in particular had a kind of helplessness and powerless about him that was hard for me to see.  After Dr. Lynch pointed this out, I began to be more attentive to Edgar’s struggle.  I noticed, that although he was completely capable of doing things for himself, he wasn’t.  I wondered why this was, was it because he didn’t feel the power to do it? Was he being enabled by adults (or even teachers) in his life? The first time I noticed him having trouble was over putting a simple board puzzle back together and putting it on the shelf. Sounds simple right? For me, I couldn’t even believe this was a problem for him because he is incredibly bright and high achieving.  So as he began to get frustrated and upset that he couldn’t get it together. I started to ask him, “what do you think you can do to put this puzzle together?” And we had this dialogue of how he could get it together for the next 10 minutes. And here’s the success story--he got it together! And guess who didn’t help him at all? I only asked him what HE could do.  I don’t know if this resonates with any of you out there, but I put this down as a high for me.  How could a small child putting a very simple 5 piece board puzzle back together be a high for me? Well, when I stepped back and looked at this situation more broadly, I realized that Edgar was doing this A LOT.  With so many things, especially relating to school work.  He was constantly waiting for someone else to do these things for him.  I think I learned an important lesson from Edgar about letting children be in control of things they can be in control of.  

Another implementation in our classroom that has really changed the dynamic of our class for the better has been jobs.  I wasn’t too big on jobs in the beginning of the school year because I really just thought, this is going to take up so much time.  I will have to instruct the children everyday all day about how to do their job.  I thought, jobs aren’t helpful.  After reading in Conscious Discipline, “each child in the classroom should hold a job.  These jobs contribute to the functioning of the classroom and the health of the school family”(Bailey, 2000, p. 67), I began to wonder if maybe we’ve been missing out on jobs. We began the task of dreaming up 22 meaningful jobs for my students.  These jobs have been SO beautiful to see the children perform.  Just to highlight a few: 

Energy Manager: In charge of putting oxygen in our brains either through breathing and stress relieving techniques, music and movement, or exercise.  They also ask everyone how they are feeling in the morning, why they feel this way, and if they are feeling bad if there is anything we can do as a class to help them feel better.  This is probably one of my favorite things we do everyday and it’s incredibly beautiful to see students take interest in their classmates feelings.  

Hamster Veterinarian: Our class hamster, Mr. Cho Bing is very well taken care of thanks to this job.  He is observed daily and the veterinarian records their observations and tells the other students about Mr. Cho Bing.  They are also in charge of feeding and cleaning his cage (with teacher help).  This idea was presented to me by my DRC group (Kimela, Brandi, and Issiah), for my animal expert student to help her feel more confident and empowered in our classroom.  

Kindness Reporter: This student’s job is to tell me about the kindness they witness in the classroom daily, we record it and put it in a binder.  We read the kindness report everyday at the end of the day and kiss our brains for being good friends.  I intentionally chose a student that had a lot of conflict with peers to be the kindness reporter for their first time to get them interested in kindness and spreading the love! 

Now as for the lows, as I look back over this past month, my lows have also had to do with conflict with students in the classroom.  I’ve been thinking about what Conscious Discipline says, “When classroom conflict becomes the core of the social-emotional curriculum, children learn valuable social skills, develop self-discipline and self-control, and are able to focus on schoolwork more effectively” (Bailey, 2000, p. 16).  This statement has been so important to me as I try to effectively implement a healthy discipline for my students and help them resolve conflict in a healthy way with their peers.  For several students in particular, this has been very difficult, and I must admit, I’ve been pretty discouraged.  As much as I see the progress of the whole class and some students, I see the stagnant progress of backwards progress of others.  There have been times when I think, “I’m doing something wrong” or, “I’m missing something here”.  I admit, I don’t know what to do about a child that hits or stomps on other children all day long, every day.  It’s frustrating, because on one had you want to protect the other students in your care, but on the other hand, I really want to figure out what is going on with this particular student and help them with their stress level.  

I guess at the end of the day, what’s important in my classroom is that my students feel empowered in their relationships with their peers and with me.  I’m still learning how to do this effectively.  We’re a work in progress!