Category Archives: Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

early childhood education, children, play

Taking Ownership

I know where I’m going
And I know who’s going with me
Irish Folk Song

Sometimes we think that we know where we are going. We have plans. We have all the tools that we need to get there. We’re well – prepared for the journey.
And yet, something along the way moves us in another direction. It entices us.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a market study that was taking place in a first grade class in East New York, Brooklyn. The children visited many different markets and they were involved in recreating the markets in their classroom. This was their direction…learning about and recreating markets. All was well. Children were absorbed in the study. The teachers understood the roadmap. And then…

The class went on a trip to the Union Square Market, a large farmers market located in Manhattan. “Where’s the market?” the children asked, looking for the sliding doors, the big freezers, the conveyer belts. “Oh, so THIS is the market!” What a discovery!

The children were given 2-dollar vouchers that they pooled together and they bought all sorts of new and unknown vegetables…. Brussels sprouts, parsley, kale, spinach, peppers, basil, celery…and brought them back to the classroom to observe and taste.

Each child took home a “mystery bag” of vegetables to share with their families. The next day they brought in lists of all that they could name and identify and told each other what they did with the vegetables when they brought them home.

The farm and the produce became a hot topic of conversation. “I wonder if we could make a farm in our classroom?” mused the teacher. Yes!

The children planted seeds and labeled their crops.

They constructed fences between the different vegetables that were in their gardens.

The road turned.

The Market Study has morphed into a study of good nutrition. This was amazingly timely, coinciding with Michelle Obama’s attempt to confront childhood obesity with her “Let’s Move” initiative. Katie Rust, one of the teachers, sent me this message in an email, “we decided, after much pressing …to write to Michelle Obama about our work with fresh produce. Our class is beginning a “Healthy Food Initiative” …. Mr. Mastin and I are taking a teacher pledge to offer only fresh produce as snacks, and parents will be doing the same. Students will be writing letters describing our market study and how it has inspired us to be better decision makers about our food. We hope to complete the package to send within the next two weeks and we’ll keep you up to date. … I’ve attached the parent letter/pledge…. We’ll be having a healthy Thanksgiving party this Wednesday at noon “

The children have been reading circulars to see how healthy and not-so-healthy products are advertised. They’re becoming wise consumers.
The teachers and the children have taken ownership of this study and followed a detour leading to a more personal destination. Sometimes we think that we know where we are going. And yet, something along the way moves us in another direction.

December 6, 2013: New photos added – The Avocado

Just about to taste this avocado

To Market, To Market – Inquiry study in first grade

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We don’t hear too many good stories about schools, classrooms and teachers these days. The newspapers focus on failing schools, teacher evaluations, low scores…negative, negatives, and negatives. I’d like to occasionally show some examples of teachers who are on a quest for providing the best and most appropriate educational climate for their children. Sometimes this involves taking baby steps towards change. That’s ok. Babies don’t just get up and walk. They first crawl, and then they often “cruise” around a room to build their walking confidence. Then, one day they’re walking their way around their little world.

I’m going to share a little snapshot of Katie and Andy’s classroom. They teach first grade in a UFT sponsored charter school in East New York Brooklyn. This is an economically poor, mainly African American neighborhood. Many children live in shelters or in foster homes.

When I visited Katie’s class last year, children sat at desks that were set up in rows facing the front of the room. The teacher taught. The children listened and copied work written on the wipe board that was behind the teacher. There were no centers. No art center. No blocks. No science center. You can get the picture.

What I’m sharing today is the start of a Market Inquiry Project that they are involved with this fall. They’ve visited many markets in and out of the neighborhood. They went to a local community farm and they are planning on visiting a large farmer’s market in Manhattan. What they decide to see and explore is directed by the students’ questions and by their prior knowledge.

After a trip, the teachers ask the children how they would like to represent their new information. Out of this discussion, the centers for the week are set up.

The class now has a block center and also a nicely stocked art center.
The desks are arranged in clusters so that children can collaborate on projects. Discussion and collaboration are becoming an important instructional goal this year.

In the block center the children are building a supermarket. Before they began their construction they worked together to draw a plan. This was posted in the center to be used as a building reference. As they made changes in their building, children returned to the original plan to revise it. The day that I visited the classroom, they decided that their market would have a drive-in restaurant!

Revising the market plan

Drive-Through Supermarket Restaurant

Because they noticed many signs in the market, a sign-making center was set up. These signs were brought to the children working in the block center. Another group of children were making products for the market. There was another center where children were making bilingual circulars. I couldn’t quite understand what was happening at the center until one of the children picked up a pile of advertising circulars to show me. The teacher explained that when they visited a Target store the children noticed that many signs were in English and Spanish. They were studying Spanish in school and decided that their market would have English/Spanish circulars.

I was particularly intrigued by the group of children who were sitting on the floor working on a writing project. They told me that they were writing a play about a mother who was shopping in a market with her child. Now they were writing the script. At the start of the school year, for first graders, so much of the effort at this point was in actually determining how to write each word. The children’s collaborative effort in figuring out the spelling was impressive. A year ago, children telling each other how to spell a word might have been reproached for cheating! Now, it’s considered collaboration and it’s celebrated.
http://youtu.be/Oj5ibBhQVwA

I feel like I would like to celebrate the giant steps that Katie and Andy have taken towards creating an exciting, creative, collaborative first grade classroom!

Listening to the Whispers of the Mind

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After working as an early childhood consultant for the past ten years, I’ve finally come to a realization about the true nature of my job. Consultants usually have a fairly defined focus to their work. Often they are working with teachers to refine their writing instruction, reading instruction or math instruction. I originally thought that my consulting work basically concentrated on social studies inquiry and investigative choice time centers. Well, of course that is the area that I’m working on with early childhood teachers. I think, however, that the true nature of my work in the schools is to be a strong advocate for children and childhood.

It’s no secret anymore that teachers and administrators are being forced to structure their curriculums in ways that eliminate opportunities for children to be explorative, playful and creative in their thinking. Children have little opportunity for social interactions with their peers. School days are gridded into neat little boxes. Literacy is believed to exist only in a block of time, usually at the start of the day, often during the entire morning without much of a break.

Somehow, this narrow, boxed-in definition of literacy makes me uncomfortable. Living in a home with an artist and a pianist, I can see how much learning occurs in ways that one might not expect. My husband, Simon Dinnerstein, is an artist but he is also an incredibly intellectually and socially curious person. He listens carefully to everyone and everything – the plumber who is fixing our sink and the scientist who is interviewed on television by Charlie Rose – and he observes the world around him with great intensity. All of this new information somehow works together to inspire a new work of art.

My daughter, Simone Dinnerstein, is a concert pianist who mainly performs classical music but she listens to all different genres of music and lets these different sounds rest within her. In her travels she meets and forms friendships with a variety of people from the neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks, in New York to the Vienna-based theramininist, Pamela Kurstin. As a result of her curiosity and her reflective intellect, her interpretation of the various composers’ work and her performances of their pieces continue to become more expansive and personal.

I thought about this when I recently read a review of Daniel Goleman’s new book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. I was particularly taken with his description of open awareness “Always a rare and elusive form of thinking, it seems to be getting rarer and more elusive. Our modern search – engine culture celebrates information gathering and problem solving – ways of thinking associated with orienting and selective focus – but has little patience for the mind’s reveries. Letting one’s thoughts wander seems frivolous, a waste of practical brainpower. Worse, our infatuation with social media is making it harder to hear the mind’s whispers.”

In New York City, there’s a new teacher evaluation tool called Advance. Multiple measures of “teacher effectiveness” are used to rate teachers. Some of the tools that are used include observations of classroom practice, reviews of teachers’ artifacts, student outcome data and student feedback. For the classroom observations, administrators use Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching.

The original purpose of this document was to be used as a tool to support a teacher’s professional development. The NYC Department of Education has turned it into an instrument for rating teachers. Principals observe a teacher for 15 minutes, writing down every word that teachers and children say during this time period. The administrator then spends a few hours (really!) matching up every part of the lesson with the four domains of the Framework. After a lot of paper work, all information is fed into the Advance computer program and a teacher rating is regurgitated back. This does not take into account anything that the principal knows about the teacher or the children. It’s all based on the computer’s data-driven results. Each teacher is rated this way six times during the school year. There’s no place for nuance. There’s no place for the principal’s opinion based on the teacher’s history in the school. Data. It’s all data-driven.

In a recent meeting with teachers, Michael Mulgrew, the head of the United Federation of Teachers, said that he originally told Charlotte Danielson that her wonderful document would be put through the Department of Education’s system and come out with razor blades attached. So it seems to have happened. If the teacher gets an unsatisfactory rating, his or her job is on the line. This process certainly isn’t encouraging teacher creativity. Towing the line is the order of the day.

As our public schools continue to show signs of this McCarthy-like coercion, how can we expect teachers to give children opportunities to hear the whispers in their minds? Teachers also need to be relieved of the stress imposed by an out of touch bureaucracy so that too they can feel free to incorporate their own experiences and interests in their interactions with children.

Once, when I was teaching kindergarten, I noticed one of the children, Brooklyn, returning to the same book, day after day. This was in September, soon after our summer vacation. I pointed this out to the class and told them that I found this particularly interesting because I did the same thing during the summer. I told them that I read a book called House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. I liked it so much that I began reading it again as soon as I finished the last page. Now, I said, I was looking for other books by the same author. I then wondered if Brooklyn would be looking for more books by Dr. Seuss. This began a class search for Dr. Seuss books to add to Brooklyn’s book pile and it also instigated a temporary class obsession with finding and collecting books by their own favorite authors. The excitement for this activity lasted for a short period of time and then we moved on to something new. I didn’t think about the discussion that led to the author collections until a June day when one of the children asked me if I was going to read them my ghost story. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was referring to. “You know, the one that you read two times last summer.” Children listen and think about what we say and do.

We all need to figure out a way of being advocates for children. We need to be sure that we’re saying and doing what is really right for them. They need quality time to for exploring, questioning, playing, creating and theorizing. In a recent email exchange that I had with Charlotte Danielson she wrote: “we seem to have lost that aspect of early childhood education, which should be obvious to anyone who’s watched four-year-olds at “work” – exploring, formulating hypotheses (they don’t call them that of course, but that’s what it is – trying things out to see what happens), etc. For young children it’s all about inquiry!”

I’d like to expand on what Charlotte Danielson wrote and say that it’s all about inquiry for all children, not only four year olds, and that it is important for us to remember that. Without opportunities for inquiry, we open up the possibility of frivolously wasting the brainpower of our future citizens and, it seems, of creating unhappy and stressed – out schoolchildren.

They should be getting dirty counting frogs in ponds!

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They shouldn’t count frogs on pages.They should be getting dirty counting frogs in ponds.

This statement says it all.

I’m sharing Monique Dois’ impassioned and articulate letter because she presents such wonderfully clear reasons why this testing mania is inappropriate and misguided. I hope that this is a letter that will go viral on the internet to support a movement that lobbies for a return to appropriate instructional practices in early childhood grades!

October 18, 2013

Dear Commissioner King,

It appears that I have to take some time out of my day to explain to you why my just-turned-five-year-old son shouldn’t be taking your standardized bubble tests as a “Measure of Student Learning” (MOSL) in Kindergarten. I would think that the last sentence that I wrote would stand on it’s own and that I wouldn’t need to elaborate the point any further. (“Kindergarten” and “standardized bubble test” just appeared in the same sentence, in case you missed it.) Unfortunately, it seems that all of the research in best early childhood practices has been thrown out the window in the interest of what you call reform.

I was thinking of writing to you about all of the ways that this kind of testing is inappropriate for 4 and 5 year-old children. For example, I was thinking about how kids in this age range can’t sit still. Or how young kids have the tendency to cry and run away from being forced to do stupid stuff. I was also imagining how my son is much more likely to make an elaborate pattern on your bubble sheet than fill in “right answers.” (And this would be a much better use of his time and mathematical energies, actually.) I was also tearing up thinking about how the wonderfully empathetic minds of young children don’t understand what “cheating” is. I wanted to communicate how painful it is to me as a parent and educator to think about kids trying to help each other on the test, only to be told by their powerless teacher that that is not allowed.

So, I guess what I am saying Commissioner King, is that it crossed my mind to address you on all of the ways that this kind of testing will further degrade kindergarten. But then I remembered hearing that your children go to a Montessori school. And I got angry. Why? Not because I don’t think your children deserve an active, hands-on, developmentally appropriate, loving, playful, and artful experience in school. But I think all children do. Stop bubble testing our babies!

Then I remembered that you don’t like hearing impassioned pleas of educators and parents. When we tried to compel you to stop destroying our children’s tenacity and love of learning at a forum in Poughkeepsie you arrogantly called us “special interest” groups and then canceled the rest of your public hearings. It sounds to me, Commissioner, that you are still developing the stamina, perseverance and grit that it takes to really listen to all the people who disagree with you and take their varying perspectives into consideration while building your own. So instead of going that route and getting all “emotional mom,” I decided to keep it simple and professional:

Commissioner King, you can’t measure student learning in Kindergarten using a pencil and paper bubble test. I’ll give you one example. On one of these Measures of Student Learning (MOSL) you ask children to select the illustration that shows 13 frogs. Something that seems so simple as being able to count thirteen is not really that simple at all. Let me explain.

While children are learning to count they show a number of behaviors in the process of counting actual objects that are not captured on this test. For example, if you give my son 13 buttons and ask him to count them, this is what will happen: First he will get a mischievous grin and say “A lot! So many I can hardly count!” This will tell you that he will probably have to work hard counting numbers in this range (it’s funny how kids will tell you what they need, if you listen). Then he will start counting. He starts by moving the buttons into a line, which shows us that he has some understanding that he needs to keep track of his counting. Then as he gets to 9 he will stop moving them and start just touching them where they are. This tells me that at 9 he has to start working hard to remember the counting sequence and starts attending more to that and less to keeping track. He may loose his one-to-one correspondence as he focuses his effort on the counting sequence and just hover his fingers over buttons as he chants the numbers. If I ask him to do it again, he may line up all of the buttons and accurately count them all, because the first time he tried got him warmed up for the task.

After he shows evidence that he grasps how to count 13, then I would ask him to give me 13 buttons from my collection. It is much more challenging to count out 13 buttons than to count a pile of 13 buttons. It requires my son to be really secure in his understanding of 13 because of different skills being juggled. The inconsistency of his counting 13 will tell us that my son is in the right range for his learning potential and I will look for lots of ways to give him 10-20 real life objects for him to count and manipulate in different contexts. We may call all of this practice in “composing and decomposing numbers to 20”. Though, as opposed to your seriously bewildering Engage NY modules, we don’t usually call it that when we are talking to 4 or 5 year-olds. Doing so doesn’t make our instruction more rigorous, it makes it more ridiculous.

At this point, my son is likely to pick out and start talking about his favorite button and how it is so shiny and how he loves the sparkly, rainbow-y colors. This may seem off task to you, and you may be likely to have me redirect him. But an experienced Kindergarten teacher like my son’s teacher would encourage him to play with the buttons. She would observe what he does, take his lead, help give him language for his play as he sorts the buttons by color, size, number of holes, “sparkliness” and so on. Play is serious work in Kindergarten.

This understanding of the development of number sense in young children is completely lost on your tests. Your system is so riddled in so-called “high standards”, and a can’t-reach-the-ever-moving-bar deficit model of education, that you have completely lost track of what makes for good teaching. I know that my child’s Kindergarten teacher is much better equipped to assess my kid’s counting than your multiple choice questions. I am outraged by the very notion that you will assess her as a teacher using the completely unreliable “data” mined from these MOSL bubble tests.

Early childhood teachers are unfortunately used to being degraded, undervalued and our work rendered invisible. But enough is enough. We have to draw the line with tests that are an insult to our professional as well as common sense. Making teachers use an inappropriate assessment that is tied to their very survival as a teacher, will encourage them to do inappropriate things to kids. Tests that require kids to count frogs on pages will only encourage teachers to have kindergarteners count lots of frogs on lots of pages. Kindergarteners should be given meaningful opportunities to solve real life number problems, build nature collections, make beautiful patterns with buttons, describe objects and live and learn what it feels like to hold numbers of objects in their tiny, precious hands. They shouldn’t count frogs on pages.They should be getting dirty counting frogs in ponds.

Thanks for listening, Commissioner King. I know that you are working on your ability to hear criticism. I appreciate you sticking with me through all of this. I know it required a considerable attention span. Luckily unlike my 5 year old you do have the capacity for such attention, even if you don’t regularly practice using it while listening to teachers and parents. Practice makes perfect!

Sincerely,

Monique Dols, mom to a Kindergartener and early childhood teacher
Bronx, NY

P.S. You know Froebel, right? He’s the guy that like, totally inspired Kindergarten and Montessori. Before he came along people used to think that play in early childhood was a frivolous waste of time. I know, crazy right!? What were they thinking?

A Mother’s Call for Help ll

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For Joey and her friends: There is a Facebook page for Stop Common Core in New Jersey https://www.facebook.com/groups/387804874675472/ I suggest that you “friend” them and get involved with this group. There’s power in numbers!
Renee

A Mother’s Call for Help

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My husband and I have been in Paris for the last three weeks, overdosing on art, food and, of course, delicious wine. The problems at home in the schools seemed so far away. How relaxing it has been to spend my time contemplating Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Renoir’s Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette rather than the sickness of high stakes testing or the anxieties caused by an obsession with the Common Core Learning Standards.

However life, real life, has found a way of creeping in to remind me of the educational problems back home. My history as a long time early childhood educator and my present work as a consultant working with early childhood teachers, demands that I help to find a way of confronting the misguided edicts that are polluting our public schools.

Yesterday I received an email from my niece, my sister’s daughter. Joey is the mother of three wonderful, active and inquisitive children. They live in a suburban town in New Jersey. I don’t often hear from Joey and so, when I received her message, I knew at once that this must be something important. Joey and her husband Rob are very involved with their family. They enroll the children in sports programs and dance classes. Joey began reading to them when they were infants. She’s never been a political activist but when I read her note to me I realized that she is about to embark on a major struggle in support of what she knows is best for her children.

Here’s Joey’s note to me:

I would like some advice.
I am not happy with the Common Core. Actually, most parents here are not. I kept telling them, “we can keep complaining to each other, or we can do something”.
I am not 100% sure what to do. I thought start small by getting as many of these parents together and having them speak at the next PTA meeting. Unfortunately, our principal is not one who cares about the students as much as he cares about pleasing those above him.

Robert and Michael are doing well, but does a 3rd – grader need to know about checks and balances? Does a 5th grader need to start being prepped for the SAT test by learning Greek and Latin and getting rid of a second language to push this?
And I fear for Lauren’s education. She is only into one month of kindergarten, and cries that there are no toys. She comes home with work sheets galore.
I ran from NY because I watched my son’s (then in 1st and 3rd grade) come home flushed from sitting in their seat all day working and working. Or how they would come home, after having no recess only having to do more work and not get time to play.

Now, living here, recess has been cut 5 minutes, what will next year bring?

My sons have no time to finish their lunch, because I guess eating is no longer important.

There was nothing sent home over the summer to bridge them into this new curriculum, the teachers are frustrated with their district deadlines, and the kids are stressed. I fear a generation of antidepressants and suicides.

Okay, having said all of that… Where do I begin?
Thanks for reading my rant:) and if you can give me any advice, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,
Joey

I made a plan to speak with Joey when I get back from my vacation on October 22nd. That doesn’t give me much time to come up with a practical solution or advice for action! I’ve sent her a link to the Alliance for Childhood so that she can read about an organization that is advocating to bring play back into the curriculum .I also sent her a link to the New Jersey Common Core Standards so that she can familiarize herself with the standards that teachers must now use to guide their planning and instruction.

I know of principals in New York City who are working diligently to satisfy their higher-ups while also being careful to insure that teachers follow a developmentally appropriate curriculum in their classrooms. These leaders, however, are few and far-between. There seems to be a McCarthy-like
fear that is permeating the system, intimidating administrators, terrorizing teachers, creating stressed-out children and, from what I gather from Joey’s note, frustrating and confusing parents.

I’m reaching out to all of the educators, parents, grandparents and friends of children who read this blog. Do you have suggestions for how I can respond and support Joey and the other parents in her school? What can parents and teachers do to be sure that their children attend public schools where learning is fun, exciting, and explorative? Is it possible for parents, teachers, administrators and other educational leaders to find a common ground where they can dialogue on the role that the Common Core Standards plays in our present educational environment?

The Power of Rituals: The Birthday Circle

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Chloe and Malick celebrating their summer birthdays.

There is your chair, and the birthday child’s chair.
It is almost time.
The children are taking their circle places
while the birthday child goes to the box of birthday books
and makes her choice certainly and without hesitation.
You’ve taught the children to grow up with books
So no wonder a book is at the center of this ritual.
Now you fit the crown upon the birthday child’s head-
a ponytail to manage!–engaging the class all the while.
Okay? Ready?
Ready.
Let the reading commence!

Happy Birthday Little Bear from a year ago
gives way to Just in Time for the King’s Birthday.
In this reading the King will be a Queen, Queen Sophie
to be exact, which extracts a wide smile from the birthday girl
each time you say it.
The children begin to mumble a few words with you,
and now they are reciting large sections of it
as though this is some birthday chorale,
the words some luscious candy
to be eaten once a year.
“Say the words to yourself, boys and girls,” you remind them,
and then you are accompanied by a silent chorus
as ecstatic as if they were singing Bach!

The End. The children are satisfied.
You give a child a smooth birthday stone
you found at Gerritsen Creek. The child knows just what to do.
This is the end of the second year, after all!
From child to child the rock is passed and from each
a message to the birthday child:
“We have been friends since we were little. Do you remember
when the fishtank broke in pre-school?”
“You always have a mischievous look on your face
and when you come into the room, I always think
it is like the sun coming into the room.”
(You, fearless one, are always apart,
teacher, negotiator, disciplinarian,
and part of things,
swamp walking, jitterbugging, birthday message.)
“Happy Birthday. Good Luck.”
“I want you to know you are a good friend to me.”
this is the time for the messages that bear saying
(They are so much more sophisticated this year than last
when the rock nearly flew around the circle.)
I imagine each child listens differently,
shyly, boldly, quietly,
with who knows what private dialogue
as she or he is appointed the center of the universe,
stars and planets revolving around this glittering birthday crown.
The child I am watching listens intently, nods, smiles
Goes into moments of a little reverie.

But isn’t that what the whole thing is about?
A reverie? A meditation on entering this world?
The dream is broken with a chorus of happy birthday,
then, how old are you?
The birthday child responds in song:
I am seven years old.
All together now: One two three four five six seven and,
Arms rolling, a roll for good luck. Napkins! Cupcakes!
“I want chocolate!” “I don’t like chocolate!” “I want red glitter!” “I want green!”
Ah, now we are back to the real world, a group of hungry seven year olds.

Seven! How did this happen? That
these children, so apprehensive, so new, so fresh two years ago
like wriggling tadpoles
should now be these self-assured youngsters,
rulers of their world, master of the ceremonies
that move them along in this classroom, their world,
their world, with you, the one they quote at home
attend to, criticize, praise, listen for, listen to (when all goes well)

For you, Queen Renee, la reine, la regina
We wish a birthday poem that includes the quiet joy
that comes with creation.
If we could gather these children together twenty years from now
to sing to you that birthday song,
we would find a chorus of voices in which,
yes, even after so many years, so many teachers,
so many events that we cannot possibly now know,
we would still hear you.

This beautiful poem, written by Sophie’s mother Barbara Danish,was a gift for me at the end of my second year teaching a class of lovely children. We began our birthday ritual in September of kindergarten and ended it in June of first grade. The poem really says it all.

Our ritual was simple. When the children came in I had a pre-cut but undecorated paper crown waiting on a table and children who wanted to began to “pretty it up” – crayons, markers, glitter – whatever they chose. The morning message contained the first official birthday wish of the school day.

At the end of the day we had our birthday circle. A chair was set up for the birthday celebrant. I had a basket of books with birthday themes for the birthday child to choose from. Some popular books were Just In Time for the King’s Birthday; Happy Birthday Little Bear; A Birthday for Frances; Happy Birthday, Moon; The Secret Birthday Message; Some Birthday!; Birthday Soup (a chapter in the Little Bear book), and A Letter to Amy. The birthday child picked a book for me to read to the class. The children giggled and loved when I substituted the name of the birthday child when I read the story!

I had a smooth stone that was our birthday stone. After the story, the stone was passed from child to child, moving around the circle. When a child held the stone, he/she shared a birthday wish. Some children merely said, “Happy Birthday.” Others shared a personal wish or a memory connected to the birthday child. It was so interesting to observe how the quality (and length!) of each child’s birthday wish changed as the year progressed. Since I had the children for two years, there was so much growth that I could see just by listening to the depth of these shared stories and wishes.

Next came the waited for moment. The birthday child made a silent wish and blew out a candle that was placed in the middle of the birthday cupcake. Cupcakes were usually brought to school in the morning by the child’s parents. On some occasions, I rushed out to buy cupcakes and juice at lunchtime if a child didn’t bring these to school. Parents were told at the start of the school year that they could only bring juice, cupcakes or muffins and, if they liked, some birthday plates and napkins. I did not allow cakes or party bags. Also, if children had parties outside of school that did not involve the entire class, then invitations had to be mailed, not given out in class.

After the candle was blown out, we sang the Happy Birthday song and then children went to the tables to eat, drink and chat.

This was our ritual. The pattern was the same for each child. The children loved it. I loved it. Nobody had, what my mother-in-law would have called, a hooh-hah extravaganza and I really don’t think that anyone felt deprived. Our birthday ritual was part of the glue of our classroom community, overflowing with love,warm wishes and sometimes the tears of visiting parents!

Gesell Institute on Common Core for Grades K – 1

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Here’s something for early childhood educators and parents of young children to ponder.

Gesell Institute Statement on the Common Core Standards Initiative
March 18, 2010
The core standards being proposed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers are off the mark for our youngest learners. We at Gesell Institute call for a new set of standards for Kindergarten through Grade 3 that adhere to solid principles of child development based on what research says about how and what young children learn during the early years, birth to age eight. The proposed standards for Kindergarten through grade 3 are inappropriate and unrealistic. Policy must be set based on hard data and not on unrealistic goals surrounding test scores.
If the achievement gap is to be closed, child development must be respected and scientific research surrounding how children learn must be taken into account. Research clearly shows that early readers do not have an advantage over later readers at the end of third grade, and attempts at closing the achievement gap should not be measured in Kindergarten based on inappropriate standards.
The work of Gesell Institute has long been focused on research and best practice in child development and education – our legacy is based on the ground-breaking work of Dr. Arnold Gesell, a pioneer in the field of child development who observed and documented stages of development with normative data reflecting what children typically do at each age and stage. Currently, our national study collecting developmental information on over 1400 children across the country is in its final stages of data collection. This data, to be released in Fall 2010, is expected to further support what we know about how children develop and what they know at various ages, as well as the importance of focusing on appropriate methods for teaching young children.
We urge the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to respect the individual developmental differences of children and revise the K-3 standards based on research and the advice of experts in the field of early childhood. Having endorsed The Alliance for Childhood Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative, we support the call to withdraw the early childhood standards and create a consortium of experts “to develop comprehensive guidelines for effective early care and teaching that recognize the right of every child to a healthy start in life and a developmentally appropriate education.”

Oh Joy! It’s the first day of kindergarten!

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I can still hear the sound of children crying, see the exciting roll of big white paper with crayons invitingly nearby, and feel my hear thumping in my chest. Each new start of a school year always seems to conjure up memories of my very first day of kindergarten.

My sister was just born and my mother needed to stay home with her. My father had to open his hardware store in the morning, so I went to school with my mother’s friend Elsie and her daughter Ronnie. Ronnie seemed quite confident and jumped right into some activity that was put out on one of the child-sized tables. Shy Renee stood on the side, wanting to be a big schoolgirl but also wanting to be home in a nice, safe place. That’s pretty much all that I can remember from my first day of school, other than the little boy who wet his pants and had to be taken to the bathroom in the corner of the room to be changed and my father coming to pick me up at the end of our half day of school and jokingly referring to my teacher, Miss Hefferman as “Miss Peppermint!” While his joke is funny in retrospect, at the time I was mortified that he was making fun of my teacher’s name. I think that I was also so afraid that she might hear my father’s blasphemy! These memories are as fresh as though they happened yesterday and not (could it really be?) 64 years ago. I can’t say if my first day was a good experience or a frightening experience. Mainly, I know that it was important enough to be memorable.

Years later, when I became a kindergarten teacher, I knew that it was important for the first days of school to set the tone for the year. I wanted all of the children, the outgoing, confident ones and the shy, quiet ones, to leave school excited and enthusiastically eager to return the next day. I’m not sure if this always worked for each child, but that was my big goal. I knew that establishing routines was important but that would happen as children began to understand the flow of the school day.

Getting children to learn how to follow routines was most definitely never my primary focus for these first days of the school year. Setting the stage for each child’s love of school was my personal mandate.

I made sure to create a room that would be welcoming, comfortable and interesting. For instance, I had Peter the turtle, named by a class, many years ago, after a character in their favorite book, A Snowy Day. One year I had the offer of a used 55-gallon tank, which I accepted. Although it took up a lot of precious classroom space, I had an instinct that this turtle would be an important member of the class and I was right. Throughout the year, children chose to write stories, non-fiction books and poems about Peter.

I set up the tank right near the entrance to the classroom. Children and parents started the first day by greeting me at the doorway and then greeting Peter! At the other side of the tank was the carpet where we would have our class meetings. Often, to the giggling joy of the children, Peter would climb up on his rock and seem to listen to our singing and enjoy our stories.

So, what actually happened in my kindergarten classroom on the first day of school after the photo-snapping parents and grandparents left their most wonderful treasures in my care?

I set up activities on the tables for the children to explore. For example, in the art area I might have had a vase full of sunflowers, art postcards with flower reproductions for children to look at, paper of different sizes, crayons and colored pencils.

In those wonderful days when I had a paraprofessional working with me, I set up a table for making playdough. This was always a magnet for children. The assistance of paraprofessionals in the classroom, alas, is now only a memory in most New York City classrooms. When I became the sole educator in the room, I put out playdough that I made the night before school began for children to play with on this first day of school. New week, when Choice Time would begin, I would sit with a group of children to make playdough for the week. (I never used commercial playdough in my class. My reasoning opens up a big discussion of process versus product. Perhaps this can be another blog entry!)

The dramatic play center was open, but on the first few days I only included a small amount of dress-up clothes, play dishes and pots, a play telephone and a small pad with pencil. In the near future, as the children became more skilled at cleaning up, I would add more materials to the center.

I put out some simple puzzles that would be inviting but not overwhelming and some manipulatives such as a pegboard and a magnet-builder. The block center was closed (blocks covered with a sheet or paper) on the first few days. Very soon I would introduce the unit blocks to the entire class through a whole class building activity.

When all of the parents left, I was free to walk around, chat with the children and record my initial observations. How did children approach and use the materials that I put out for them? Who jumped into an activity and who stood on the side and needed my help to join a group or find an activity?

Clean up time, too, was informative for me. In looking through my scribbled notes in some of my old plan books, I see that some years I wrote, next to clean-up time, “good job by class” or “Tommy might need special help learning to do this” or “leave more time for clean-up.” These initial observations gave me the information I needed to guide me in planning appropriate lessons for helping children learn clean-up procedures and also for helping children learn to transition from one activity to another.

When we all met on the rug the first day, I shared the year’s first morning message. Because it was a short school day, I didn’t plan a separate snack time. The children had a snack on the rug as I read them a storybook. One year it was Mooncake. Another year I read Franklin in the Dark, which turned out to be very popular with the children, perhaps because of the turtle in the room.

I usually taught the children two songs the first week of school. I wanted them to sing songs that they could bring home and sing to their families. It wasn’t the same two songs each year, but two popular ones were Woody Guthrie’s “Howdi Do” which we sang throughout the year at the start of the day, and “Freight Train“, a very calming song that we often sang after lunch and at the end of the day. In each case I eliminated verses or even changed some to make them more appropriate for 4 and 5 year olds.

I might, if time permitted, teach the game Statues or Mirror (Face-to-Face). I did, however, try to keep the time that children sat on the carpet as short as possible.

At the end of the morning, the children drew self-portraits. (Sometimes I saved this activity for the second or third day of school.) I gave each child an individual mirror and a paper with the child’s name. As one would expect with 4 and 5 year olds, there was always a wide range of drawing abilities. Some children made noticeably realistic drawings and some children were happy with squiggle sketches. I celebrated all of them. We would create self-portraits at the start of each month. By the end of the year these drawings became wonderful assessments for the children and for me.

The first day or two were usually half days that tended to be over sooner than I always expected. The morning would end with our new song and with some description on my part of something exciting that would happen the next day.

I know that my synopsis of the start of the school year is rather sketchy. However, the big idea that I would like to emphasize is how important it is to think of these opening days of the kindergarten year as a special time when teachers can begin to generate children’s enthusiasm and joyful love of school. This is the excitement that teachers can build on throughout the school year!

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Howdi Do 

I stick out my little hand

To ev’ry woman, kid and man

And I shake it up and down,

howjido, howjido

Yes, I shake it up and down, howjido

Howdy doozle doodle doozie  

Howji hijie heejie hojie,  Howji hojie heejie hijie,  

Howjido, howjido, howjido, sir,  Doodle doosie, howjido.

On my sidewalk, on my street,  Any place that we do meet,

Then I’ll shake you by your hand,  Howjido, howjido,

Yes, I’ll shake it up and down, howjido

Howdy doozle doodle doozie  

Howji hijie heejie hojie,  Howji hojie heejie hijie,  

Howjido, howjido, howjido, sir,  Doodle doosie, howjido.

I feel glad when you feel good,

You cheer up my neighborhood,

Shakin’hands with ev’rybody, Howjido, howjido

FREIGHT TRAIN

Freight train, freight train going so fast.

Please don’t tell what train I’m on,

So they won’t know where I’ve gone.

Love to hear that old whistle blow.

Makes me feel like I’d like to ride some, too.

Please don’t tell what train I’m on,

So they won’t know where I’ve gone

A Passion for Learning

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The summer of July 2002, Lucy Calkins asked me if I would give the closing talk for educators attending the Early Childhood Reading Institute at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. I was honored and, truthfully, quite nervous. I’m not a pro at public speaking. However it ended up being quite an interesting experience because it led me towards reflecting on my life as a teacher. I just came upon my speech when looking through my files and I thought that I would share it with you.

After spending more than half of my lifetime surrounded by children, this year I made a major change. I’m now working in an office where wonderful colleagues in a room full of books and computers surround me. So, last week it was a treat for me to return to The Childrens School West, a small public school annex in Brooklyn where I had worked as the teacher/director last year. The kindergarten teachers invited me to their “stepping up” ceremony and celebration. As their parents watched, the children sang some of their favorite songs, recited a kindergarten poem and performed a musical play that they wrote themselves, The Gingerbread Family, a witty take on The Gingerbread Boy.

When I left the class, I found myself mysteriously crying. Thinking that I was having one of those occasional “fiftyish moments” I took some time to sit in the park across from the school to compose myself before going to my next destination, the fifth grade graduation at P.S. 321.

P.S. 321 had been my second home since I began my teaching career there in 1968. It was wonderful to sit in the audience, surrounded by so many parents that I have known over the years, and to watch my former students who I taught in kindergarten and first grade proudly receive their diplomas. I could so well remember each one of them on their very first day of school. I remembered their parents too, who looked as tentative as the children whose hands they were holding!

At the graduation I found myself sitting next to my former student Kalyn’s father. We reminisced about how he had to hold his hand over hers to help her write her letter K as she signed in on that first day of school. Once again, I found those tears welling up. As I tried to hold them back, I had a personal epiphany. I realized that I was crying because I knew what an incredibly lucky life I have had. How many adults have the opportunity to spend their lives working in a profession that is so satisfying, challenging and important to so many people?

When families bring their children to school, they are entrusting us with their most precious possessions. As a parent, and now a grandparent, I know how difficult it is to “let go” and transfer some of my responsibility for my child to another adult, much less to a total stranger. Because of this, it is so important for educators to create, in their classrooms, a second home that is comfortable and welcoming to the child and to the child’s family.

Our classrooms need to have a voice that says, “I welcome you to this exciting place where you are a very special and important part of a caring community.” We can give this message to children even before they enter school by sending them a friendly letter at the end of the summer, introducing ourselves and telling them about some exciting project that the class will be working on together. We can involve them in this project by suggesting that they collect pictures from magazines and draw representations of their ideas.

One year I wrote to my future kindergarten class and told them about a bridge study that we were going to begin together with our fourth grade reading buddies. I asked the children to start collecting bridge pictures and, if they actually saw a bridge, to sketch it and bring the picture to school with them on the first day. I also wrote to the parents and began involving them in our classroom plans by sharing some of my ideas for our class study. When the children arrived on the first day of school they came with postcards and drawings in their hands. They were full of stories to share about the bridges that they saw during the summer. Parents had photos, trip suggestions, and names of family members who had bridge expertise to share with the class.

We were already a community and the year had just begun.

Our classrooms need to have a voice that says, “In this room you will be an explorer, an artist, a musician, an architect, a mathematician, a writer, a reader and a scientist.” We need to physically arrange our rooms so that there are areas where children can explore, dramatize, build, create and experiment. We need to value these explorations by scheduling prime time for them in our daily plans. One half hour at the end of the day gives one message about what we value. A well-planned hour in the early afternoon (in the morning if you can be so revolutionary) gives a very different message about the importance that we place on children taking responsibility for the direction of their explorations.

This exploratory time, or Choice Time as it is sometimes called, is the perfect opportunity for connecting all of the strands of our curriculum. In my block area we had baskets of books about bridges, photographs and drawings of all kinds of bridges, a Big Book of one of our special fiction bridge stories, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, that children used for dramatic re-creations, a large pad for children to draw plans for bridge construction, blank labels to use for revising their building plans, and cards and paper for labeling and writing about their finished bridges. On the wall we had a growing list of bridge words that children were constantly referring to. In the Art Center, we hung art reproductions with images of bridges in them and all sorts of materials for children to construct, paint and draw with. Children labeled their constructions and wrote descriptions of their artwork. We were becoming bridge experts in many different ways and children had a great variety of opportunities to direct their own learning.

Our classrooms need to have a voice that says, “We understand that you are a literate person who can already do some reading and writing. We will all be helping you to learn more about reading and writing and we will all be learning that together.” On the first day that children come to school, I ask them to sign in on our class list and to find their name card and turn it over to show that they have arrived and are a part of the community. I celebrated all of their attempts to write their names and assured parents that even scribbles were acceptable for the first day of kindergarten. We need to show children that we accept and value their approximations while we patiently help them take steps towards conventional reading and writing.

We are all now participating in this intensive Reading Institute and, of course, we are all concerned with providing the best reading, writing and word study instruction for our children. We want to work towards helping our children meet higher standards of literacy and that is a big challenge for all of us. We want to be sure that in our classes we are planning for a balanced and comprehensive literacy program. However as we do this, it is important that we not lose sight of the bigger picture. Our balanced literacy should be a part of an even larger BALANCED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT. We want our children to have grand minds. We want our children to be curious about the world around them. We want them to understand that there are so many incredible things to learn and so many different ways of learning. We want to create classrooms where children can discover the serendipitous moments that make everyday experiences become thrilling and worth looking at more closely. We want to provide an environment where children feel safe taking risks and chasing dreams.

Recently, Milah, a former student of mine who is now a third grader, called and asked if she could interview me for a Women’s History Month assignment. She came to my home and we had a wonderful morning, drinking tea and talking about my career, my childhood, and various other aspects of my life. When we were finished, Milah said, “You know Renee, I have admired you since I met you in kindergarten.” I was so touched and taken aback by her statement. I asked her what it was that she admired. Milah, without hesitating, said that she loved the way that I taught. She said that I was “silly, exciting, and strict.” I must say that I was a bit shaken by being called strict. It seemed like a word with so many negative connotations. I asked her what she meant by “strict.” She said, “We always knew what we were supposed to do in your class. We knew that you expected us to work hard and that you expected us to do great work. But we also had so much fun and we were always doing new, silly, and exciting things.”

In their book Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning In America’s Schools, Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde suggest that there are six basic structures that are implemented by exemplary teachers. These structures are Integrative Units, Small Group Activities, Representing-to-Learn, Classroom Workshop, Authentic Experiences, and Reflective Assessment. We need to think about ALL of these structures when we design our curriculum. If we plan a day where children have a reading and writing workshop, appropriate word study, and where they are given many opportunities to hear and discuss stories that are read aloud to them, we are empowering children. We are giving children the tools that they will need for recording the investigations and discoveries that they make during Choice Time and when they are exploring the natural world around them. If we encourage children’s curiosity and show them that we value their explorations, our curriculum may take unexpected and exciting turns.

One year, after vacationing in London, I brought some postcards in to school to share with the children at meeting time. One particular card, a reproduction of the famous Rosetta Stone, fascinated a group of children and they asked if they could look at it with magnifying glasses during Choice Time. They were very curious about the hieroglyphics. I was able to find a hieroglyphic alphabet chart in my closet. This led to an activity that they thought of. They wrote their names and other familiar words in hieroglyphs! When the class went to the school library, the children asked the librarian for books about Egypt. What began as a small group exploration was catching on and spreading throughout the class. Children began to find pictures of Pyramids and Sphinxes. They brought these pictures to the block area and attempted to construct them with blocks. They made signs and descriptions and taped them to the Egyptian buildings. Picking up on this unexpected excitement, I arranged for a trip to the Brooklyn Museum where we visited the Egyptian collection. When we discussed what we observed on the trip, the children asked if they could try to make a mummy case like the one in the museum. For two weeks, different groups of children worked on constructing a paper mache mummy case during Choice Time. Another group of children created a story about the imaginary person in the case. We took the completed five-foot mummy case out to the schoolyard and spray painted it gold. Then at Choice Time four children used the hieroglyphics chart to “translate” the life story on to paper strips and glue it to the mummy case.

Did the children become “experts” on ancient Egypt? I doubt it. What they did learn, however, was that when they had an interest in something, they could read, explore and expand their knowledge in many different ways and in many different places. I hope that is what they carried with them when they left my class. I hope that they left my class with a passion for learning because if they have that passion, and if we, the educators, have given them a nurturing, inspiring learning environment and well-balanced literacy instruction, then they have the tools to succeed.

Carlina Rinaldi, the director of the municipal early childhood program in Reggio Emilia, Italy, said that we need to go into our classrooms with a road map and not with a train schedule. When we travel with a train schedule, there is no time to tarry between stops or we will miss the train. If we travel with a road map, we know the road to our destination but we can determine when we will hurry and when we will slow down. We can take detours if something interests us, but to get to our destination, we must then return to the main road. This seems like a much more interesting trip. This seems like a trip that I would cherish and remember.

So I hope that in September you will put the train schedule in your back pocket and take out your road map. Create a curriculum that will allow you and your children to see many sights, enrich your lives and have a glorious year together that will never be forgotten.

It’s now 11 years since I gave that talk. We now have Common Core Learning Standards, Teacher Evaluations, the Danielson Framework and a race to the top. Would I change what I said in July 2002? I think not!