Author: katie

Lessons from Kindergarten

Last week I finished my 20th year of teaching, and my first year of teaching kindergarten. Every year I learn many, many things to layer onto my learning and growing as a teacher. Who I am as a teacher is a rich tapestry of 20 years of students, colleagues, parents and experiences. Here is a list of the lessons learned this year.

1. Read. You can never read too many books. I filled our days with read alouds and exposed my kids to many authors and genres. The last week of school we reflected on our favorite books. The conversation was long and spirited as we discussed favorite authors and books. We finally came to the conclusion that it’s impossible to have just one favorite. I love that my kindergarteners are going into first grade with long lists of favorite authors and titles. They cherish books as much as I do. I hope this stays with them for many years.

2. Laugh. You can never laugh too much. Teaching can be stressful and teaching 20+ 4 and 5 year olds can be like herding cats. But we always have a choice  – to allow ourselves to get stressed and upset or to step back and find some humor in the situation. I learned a lot from my little friends this year about how to see the joy and laughter in a situation instead of allowing the stress to get the best of me.

3. Play. Never underestimate the power of play. I learned so much about each of my kids by observing and joining them in play. There is nothing that could be more beneficial than the Explore time we have at the beginning and end of each day.

4. Slow down. Kindergarten has taught me that everything will take at least twice as long as I’ve planned for it to take. And I finally embraced that. Next year I will really focus on planning less and not feeling rushed or pressured to move through things quickly. Slowing down lets me be more present for my students and to enjoy the moments more as well.

5. Talk more. In a classroom with the majority of children learning English for the first time, developing oral language is key. Encouraging talk during play, writing, reading, math, morning meeting, science, social studies, and throughout our day allowed all children to greatly increase their language. Talking was how we solved problems, negotiated our curriculum, built our relationships and got to know each other in our community of learners. A kindergarten classroom is never quiet. And that’s OK.

6. Talk less. This one is big for me. I tend to talk too much. I still do. But I’m working on listening more and talking less. I am trying to focus my instructions, explanations, etc. and get to the point right away. Kids tune out after a few short seconds and I’m aware of that and working at being more concise. When I talk less, it gives them more time to talk, play and learn!

7. Play. (yes, I realize I have this twice – it’s that important) Some people reply to my telling them I teach kindergarten with a “how cute – you get to play all day!” While I despise the “cute” word, it is true, I do get to play all day. And by play I am talking about all kinds of play – imaginative play, dramatic play, purposeful playful learning, authentic play, inquiry based play and discovery play. Play that goes way beyond the traditional definition of play.  I do want my kids to view making books, reading, and math workshop as play. Play is fun and learning should be fun too! I embrace the word “play” in our classroom and realize that a lot of adults need to understand what “play” looks like in our classrooms and how critical play is to learning. And while we may “play” all day – it’s through play that we learn, grow, build a solid foundation of academic and social learning and inspire a love of learning.

8. Build a community. While I’ve known for quite some time how important a strong community is, this year reminded me once again that it’s the glue that holds us all together. Our classroom community sets the stage for all the learning that occurs throughout the year. But it’s also the community that is built within our teams and our schools. I had the privilege of working with a phenomenal team this year. Sharing your days with like-minded, passionate and caring educators makes coming to school every day a joyful experience. I realize and appreciate how lucky I am to have this.

Kindergarten is my happy place. It’s where I need to be as a teacher. Having been a teacher in grades 1-8, a literacy specialist and a librarian – I’ve finally found my home in kindergarten. I thank each of my students and my colleagues for helping me see that and for giving me so much to learn from this year.

What did your students teach you this year? 

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Community

For many of my early years in teaching I spent a significant amount of time before school started designing the *perfect* behavior management system. I had the colored cards, boxes on desks with tokens, and one year an elaborate system that involved a fancy bulletin board and names on balloons that kids moved from level to level as I told them to “drop their balloon”.  And every year it was the same kids’ balloons/cards, etc. that were tattered and beat up from moving and turning them and the same kids who got to visit the treasure box or turn in tokens for rewards. Clearly, this extrinsic way of controlling behaviors was not working. Perhaps it created an illusion of an orderly classroom, (and oftentimes not) but there were always children who did not feel empowered and who were making decisions in order to “get something” or to avoid a punishment rather than to work towards a common peacefulness, community and mutual respect in our classroom.

Then, about 8 years into my teaching career,  I realized what really mattered in behavior management – and it wasn’t management at all. It was community. I really think that the heart of a successful classroom is a strong community. I don’t have a behavior plan, a behavior system, rewards, tokens, stickers, treasure boxes or anything else that, in my opinion, equates with controlling children. I don’t even have a class list of rules. Instead, I work very hard with my students from Day 1 right up to Day 180 to create a community of learners who respect, listen, care, are kind to each other and who can live together peacefully in a small space for 180 days.

So how do we do this?

We talk. A LOT. In class meetings, in role play situations, in short puppet skits that address behavior issues we need to think about as a class, and in one-on-one conferences with children who may need more guidance in becoming a part of a larger community – we work to build the relationships in our classroom. While I don’t make a list of class rules, we do create some charts together as needs arise. Charts that we construct together like, “What kind of classroom do we want to live in?” and “Words that Hurt / Words that Help” – help us keep track of our thinking as we have classroom discussions about issues that inevitably arise when many people share a small space together. I trust my kindergarteners to handle problems independently and often will say, “do you think you can handle this or do you need my help?” when a problem is brought to my attention. Most of the time, children want to be empowered to solve problems and will talk about it with their friend and come to a good solution that works for them. I want them to feel in control in our classroom and feel a shared sense of responsibility for how our classroom runs. When they do need my help we get out the puppets, do a role play, read a book that relates or have a class meeting. I turn it over to the kids with a “we have a problem in our community. How can WE solve it?”

Yes, this social curriculum takes time away from reading, writing, math, etc. But it is a critical piece of education – whether there is a standard for it or not. Children have to learn how to solve problems and how to work together in our world. They need to learn empathy, compassion, how to work through frustrations, how to build mutual respect with people they work with, and how to celebrate their successes. I want children to leave our classroom feeling empowered, with a strong sense of self-efficacy, equipped with tools to negotiate problems and issues they are going to encounter in the world. I want them to be thinkers, reasoners, questioners, problem solvers – who care a whole lot for themselves, the world and each other. Without this, it doesn’t matter what test scores, reading levels or report cards grades look like. We teach all the academic subjects, why not teach children how to create and sustain relationships, community, trust and respect. It will take them further than we can imagine.

Here are some excellent resources that I’ve read as I moved towards a child-centered, progressive classroom:

Choice Words by Peter Johnston

Learning to Trust by Marilyn Watson and Laura Ecken

On Their Side by Bob Strachota

Beyond Discipline by Alfie Kohn

Responsive Classroom materials

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Playing in 5th Grade

A few months ago I did a series of posts on Explore , a time for kids to play. I shared how we did this in my kindergarten classroom, and wondered how this might look in the upper grades. Well, two of my amazing colleagues, Devon Parks and Tara Boone, decided to take on the challenge of incorporating play into their daily lives – in 5th grade. Here is their story of how they started and what they are noticing in their classrooms. Enjoy!

“I feel like a Kindergartener!” 

“Yeah it feels good, doesn’t it?”

-Two 5th graders commenting on upper grade play

How can we foster creativity?  How can we encourage students to collaborate?  What can we do to incorporate choice in a jam-packed curriculum?  How can we foster a love of learning in ALL of our students?  These are questions that we asked ourselves as we entered our second year of teaching 5th grade.  Still feeling overwhelmed from the process of learning a new curriculum, and the pressure to produce high achieving students, we wondered what we could do in our day to address these questions and make school more enjoyable for both the students and teachers.

At a professional development staff meeting on play in the primary grades, we received the answers to our questions.  During a discussion about play in the primary grades, our principal provoked us to think about how play could be customized to work in the upper grades.  Why hadn’t we thought of this before!?  After sharing ideas about how play could work in the upper grades with teachers in a variety of grade levels, we went to the masters of play, Kindergarten.   We visited a Kindergarten classroom with our students and observed what play looks like in their rooms.  We were delighted with what we saw.  The Kindergarteners were working together to create wonderful projects using a variety of resources that had been left for them to decide how to use.  They were using technology in ways we had never imagined with children so young.  They were happy, they were collaborating, and they were passionately learning about topics that interested them. Play also created an opportunity for the teacher to work with kids one-on-one.  We left Kindergarten that day excited about the opportunities we could create for meaningful play in our own classrooms.

We began our centers by going through each subject area we covered and thinking about what materials we could use from those units to open up as a center.  At first it was difficult, but we soon realized as we went through our curriculum, materials quickly lent themselves as center items.  Students now use the jars, measuring cups, leftover water bottles, milk jugs and funnels to create their own water station where they estimate the volume of containers and measure to confirm their predictions.  Flashlights, mirrors, prisms and other materials from our light and sound unit are left for students to continue their explorations.  Our science lead teacher gathered prepared slides and taught the students how to use microscopes to look at specimens.  Links are posted and shared with students on our Blackboard site, opening another realm of possibilities for extensions of subject areas on classroom computers.  Notebook files and Internet links that are easily manipulated on the SMARTBoard are available for use on the class SMARTBoard.  Blocks and other materials allow students to build whatever structures they wish.  A variety of art supplies are available for students to use at free will.  All math supplies and games, as well as strategy games are available to students at this time as well.   Students choose the center they want to work at and are able to switch between activities at their discretion. Now we barely have to think about what we could make available for play.  The materials rapidly change as we move through our curriculum, keeping our students interested.

Since we implemented a time for play, our students have become masters of play.  We spent about 20 minutes the first day going over how materials should be used and put away and what the classroom should look and sound like at this time.  Visiting a Kindergarten classroom before we began really helped our upper grade students to understand how play should look.  Students work with a variety of partners encouraging one another through challenging tasks.  All students are engaged and working together while teachers are able to pull students for quick one-on-one attention.

The excitement and enthusiasm for play in our classrooms puts smiles on our faces and makes us feel like we are truly supporting and extending our curriculum in a meaningful and engaging manner.  We are lucky to work at a school where administration, teachers and staff are all interested in the best, most meaningful ways to reach our students and therefore, to have the opportunity to incorporate play into our regular day.  Although we can’t necessarily measure in numbers, the impact play has had on our classroom, we can observe our students engaged in a variety of opportunities for learning they would have never been exposed to otherwise.   However, we are able to measure students making academic progress in many areas while incorporating play in the daily schedule.  As it turns out, play has been the answer to our questions all along.

Devon Parks and Tara Boone – 5th grade teachers in a Title 1 public school

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Interacting with our Interactive Whiteboard

Sharing our writing on the SMARTboard through a document camera

“The principle goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.” – Jean Piaget (quote taken from Literacy Smarts)

I am fortunate to teach in a school where each classroom has a SMARTboard – an interactive white board mounted to the wall. I’ve challenged myself to find ways to use this technology tool to engage my students and move beyond simply using it as a projector screen or a digital worksheet. This is the fourth year I’ve had access to an interactive whiteboard and I’m continuing to learn so much from my colleagues, my students, a few workshops and simply playing around with the tools. Here are just a few ways that I use my interactive whiteboard in our classroom.

Morning Message

1. Morning Message

Every day I write a morning message in the form of a letter on the SMARTboard for us to interact with. I write one sentence per line in alternating colors so children can easily see different sentences. We read the message first, then fill in any missing words I left out for kids to write, read the message again to make sure it makes sense, looks right and sounds right, and finally use a variety of tools to highlight specific words, letters, punctuation, etc. Kids come up to the board to show us what they notice. For example, they may use the Magic Pen to spotlight a new sight word from the word wall. The highlighter pen is a favorite tool to highlight letters and words they know, as well as ending punctuation they are noticing. I may include a graph for kids to move their names to indicate what they would like for lunch on an upcoming field trip or what their favorite color is. All students have a traditional lap whiteboard of their own to follow along with what is happening on the SMARTboard. I find this helps keep all kids engaged and allows me to do a quick check of who is “getting it” and who needs additional support. I print one copy of the morning message before we interact with it. Then I print another copy when we are done that shows all the thinking and writing we have done. I then make a 2-sided copy to send home. This is the only homework I send home for my kindergarteners. Their job is to share the morning message with a family member and do the blank side with someone. Many of the kids “play school” with other siblings or their parents and they tell me they enjoy sharing the message at home. They do not return this to school. I ask families to save these at home in a notebook or folder for kids to revisit and read as the year goes on. It provides another text for kids to read and reread at home.

Exploring an alphabet poster on the SMARTboard

2. Playing with Art

We’ve done several projects focusing on visual art this year with the SMARTboard playing a key role in our unit. We used Kandinsky’s art to learn about geometry and recently we explored the alphabet through photographs. The children looked at alphabet posters on the SMARTboard and found the letters in the photographs. This was a station where kids could look at a variety of photographs and highlight the found letters with a variety of writing tools. We then went out and took our own alphabet pictures and are in the process of editing them into a slideshow and a poster like the ones we have studied. I love how the SMARTboard can allow children to see the art and interact with it. We have looked at a variety of art in math, science, social studies and language arts. With the SMARTboard the children have been able to experience the art as they write on it, trace over it, spotlight it, create their own and interact with it beyond what we can do with an art print. There are many art museums that allow you to download pictures of the art and save them. Google images also has many possibilities for images to use while teaching.

Watching a video clip of seals in Seattle from a student blog

3. Blogs, VoiceThread, Twitter

We use our SMARTboard not only to view and comment on class blogs that we follow, but also to create new posts on our class blog. We can do a shared writing piece with everyone participating as we create text to share on our blog and choose the accompanying photos. Recently, a student went to visit her grandparents and missed a week of school. She kept in touch with a blog. We looked at her blog every morning and commented on the posts she was writing. We’ve created several VoiceThreads this year and can use the SMARTboard to create, view and add new comments to existing VoiceThreads. We’ve shared favorite books, read a community writing piece and reflected on a field trip through VoiceThread. We also tweet on the SMARTboard – reading through our Twitter account and adding new tweets to our friends in other schools.

Making our space shuttle

4. Visual Texts

With an interactive whiteboard you can use screenshots from videos, YouTube clips, photographs, etc. and create with writing, drawing and audio right on the image. Recently the space shuttle Discovery flew over our school on its way to the Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington, DC. The kids were so excited to see this and wanted to learn more. I found clips of the space shuttle launch online, as well as a collection of photographs. I put them on the SMARTboard and the kids interacted with them, (while also using a collection of books I got from the library) – labeling parts they knew, circling parts they wanted to learn more about, creating a dialogue with the audio tool to talk about what they saw and what they still wondered about. Then they decided to build their own space shuttle in our classroom (with a LOT of aluminum foil!). This became a dramatic play area for a few weeks.

I feel like I learn and discover something new almost daily with my SMARTboard. We use it with Scribble Maps to draw on maps as we learn about geography to track the migration of monarchs, find a location from a book or to find where a Twitter friend lives. We use it with Pixie to model a visual representation of our thinking while sharing a math problem. We use it to practice concepts by sorting rhyming pictures or creating graphs for students to interact with. The possibilities are really endless!

One thing I feel strongly about, however, is that it’s not a replacement for shared writing on chart paper or a community writing book project. It can’t replace shared reading with big books or poems on charts. It’s a great resource to complement my teaching and I make sure my plans for using it have a specific purpose. I don’t use the SMARTboard for everything I do. I still use big books and highlighting tape for shared reading – but I may do a shared reading occasionally on the SMARTboard too if the text I want to use lends itself to being projected and used on the board and will benefit the kids this way. I view the SMARTboard as a tool FOR my students. It’s not just my board – it’s theirs too – that’s why it’s called interactive. I want them to use it independently, interact with it and be proficient with this tool.  I see the interactive white board as another tool to engage my students.

I recently read a great book published by Stenhouse called Literacy Smarts by Jennifer Harper and Brenda Stein Dzaldov. The authors share simple, yet meaningful, strategies for using an interactive whiteboard in your classroom. If you’re looking for more possibilities in using your interactive whiteboard, I highly recommend this book.

How do you use your interactive whiteboard in the classroom? We’d love to hear your ideas!

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Community Writing

Last week we finished a community writing project that we’ve been working on for several weeks. After completing a unit of study on fairy tales, we decided to write our own version – calling it The Three Gingerbread Kids. I posted the story in a VoiceThread below so we could share it with others. There is also a slide show that shows the illustration process.

In Catching Readers, I talk about community writing in Chapter 5 as a key component to a comprehensive literacy framework. Sharing the pen with the students as we negotiate the text together provides many excellent teaching opportunities. My kinders are making books like crazy during writer’s workshop. They are trying a variety of genres and all of them are adding words to their books – from labels to detailed sentences. I wanted to use this community writing piece as a way to support all writers in taking even bigger risks in their writing. I wanted to have them create a continuous text, based on what they learned about fairy tales, and practice strategic reading and writing actions and skills while we composed and wrote the text together. Within the context of community writing, we not only learned about letters, sounds and how words work but also about decisions writers make, such as what to include, how to best structure a sentence and how to organize their thoughts into a coherent piece of writing with a clear beginning, middle and end. I am also seeing a huge transfer in their own writing. The books they are making in writer’s workshop have more words, more details and show a clearer story structure. Kids are taking more risks as they attempt to write the words they need to create their books.

I also wanted to focus on the writer’s statement, “Writers make sure the pictures match the words.” We looked closely at our read aloud favorites and noticed that indeed, all writers make sure the pictures match the words. We took this into our illustration days, thoughtfully planning how our illustrations could not only match the words, but build upon the story, just like Mo Willems, Jan Thomas and other favorite mentor author/illustrators do. We chose to illustrate the book using a method I learned about from Ann Marie Corgill in Of Primary Importance (an excellent resource for writing). We used Sharpie permanent markers to outline our drawings. Then we filled in the colors with crayons. The bold outlines really make the illustrations pop.

Community writing is one of my favorite teaching contexts. It’s just so rich, meaningful, engaging and differentiated. It does build community and allows all children to shine. Rereading the book every day before we added a page had this book soon become a known favorite. We have it displayed in our hallway to revisit during reader’s workshop and to share with our school. Enjoy our story!

Illustrating “The Three Gingerbread Kids” on PhotoPeach

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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Three Things

Last week I was in Asheville for Spring Break, enjoying running the beautiful mountain trails there. I met two women at a bike & outdoor shop bar one evening and we started talking. The women were on a mountain biking vacation from Canada and had left their children and husbands at home. It came up in conversation that I was a kindergarten teacher, and one of the women asked me if I could tell her the top 3 things she should be doing to prepare her 2 and 4 year old children for kindergarten. Without hesitation, I told her – read to them, play with them and talk with them.

She seemed a bit surprised. She said of course she was doing those things – but what could she do to really prepare them? And then she immediately stopped, took a step back, and said, “wait – you mean everyone doesn’t do that?”

I wish all of my children came in to kindergarten with 4 years of rich, enjoyable read aloud experiences – tons of imaginative journeys they’ve taken with forts in their living rooms, fairy houses in the backyard, castles built out of refrigerator boxes, blocks and Lego creations, cardboard arcades built, time spent running from dragons, swimming with mermaids or whatever else their imagination created for them – and hours of talk with family members who not only ask questions but stop to really listen to what their young children have to say, wonder about, dream up and talk about. But the reality is that many of our kids don’t. So that’s my job. I want kindergarten to be a time for my students to hear hundreds of amazing books read aloud, to play for hours with things that interest them and with their own imaginations and to have lots and lots of time to talk and to listen, to talk and to be listened to.

Of course there are many other things that I rank with high importance as well, but my top 3…read, play and talk. Those are the things I wish all new parents knew about and made a priority for their child’s learning and development.

And the things I wish all early childhood classrooms provided for their young learners.

What are your 3 things ?

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Reading, Creating and Playing with Art

Playing with art on the SMARTboard

We have spent the last two weeks immersed in Wassily Kandinsky’s art. My kindergarteners have been talking about his art, tracing over it on transparency paper, playing with it on our SMARTboard, and creating their own “Kindergarten Kandinsky”. It’s been exciting to listen in on the conversations as the kids compared different pieces and wondered why Kandinsky made the choices he did as an artist. We have had fun playing “I spy” as the students looked closely for “the big blue circle next to the small triangle behind the three parallel lines”. They have enjoyed talking about the pictures Kandinsky made with shapes and we had quite an interesting discussion about how Kandinsky couldn’t have intentionally made an “Angry Bird” in one of his paintings since it was made 100 years ago. It started a great discussion about perspective, imagination and creating stories in our minds. I loved how they connected it to making pictures in our minds as we read!

They love looking at the big art prints on paper and the Kandinsky SMARTboard station has been a top choice during Explore time. I have a feeling the Kandinsky prints will continue to be a part of our classroom explorations and conversations for quite some time.

Cutting shapes for our mural

We ended our Kandinsky study by creating a class mural – our “Kindergarten Kandinsky”. The kids cut out a variety of shapes and lines and we carefully placed them on a large piece of butcher paper. We talked about where the shapes would go, how they would overlap, what the proximity to other shapes and lines would be and negotiated our artwork together. After everything was placed as the students wanted it, we glued it down. The kids were so excited to have a giant “Kandinsky” to discuss and talk about, just as we have talked about his original artwork.

Negotiating placement of our shapes on our mural

Our finished "Kindergarten Kandinsky"

After spring break, we are starting a photography study of the alphabet through found pictures in the environment. I think the Kandinsky study has opened our eyes to reading pictures and seeing beyond the obvious. We are ready to look for letters in nature and in our environment. Stay tuned for a post in a few weeks on this new project!

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