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.