The First Days of Kindergarten: Part One

Part ll : Hurt No Living Thing

I emailed a kindergarten teacher that I worked with and asked her if she could write something to me about why she doesn’t use behavior charts. From my observations of her teaching, I think that she is quite is masterful teacher and I thought that you might want to read the very thoughtful response that she wrote back to me.

” I honestly do not believe that behavior
charts help very much. I have tried them a few times…sticker charts, wall
charts, etc…but realized that they just didn’t help me or the kids. They just
ended up being another thing I had to remember to do. We even have a school wide
behavior system that I’m not sure if you’ve seen. It’s in all of our classrooms.
I think the DOE wanted all schools to make up their own thing. I am not a fan of
it, but have to follow it because it’s a school-wide program. I think it ends up
rewarding the wrong things & the wrong kids.

For me, it’s mostly about creating an environment where the kids understand that
they are responsible for their own behavior & there are consequences when they
do something they KNOW they shouldn’t have. Of course, that starts at the
beginning of the school year and continues throughout the year until the very
last day of school. We start the year learning about each other, the classroom,
& of course, the classroom rules. I have my own basic rules but I also try to
create the rules together with the class & we create the chart & write them down
& put it up on the wall. But, honestly, I don’t really do much with that chart
after that. Mostly, it becomes a part of our daily classroom life where we talk
about “doing the right thing,” “making good choices,” and discussing what
happens when someone is doing something they shouldn’t. I find what happens when
it’s something you talk about as a regular part of your day is that the kids end
up “policing” each other & taking charge. They know when someone didn’t make the
right choice & they tell each other. They also know there are consequences…and
yes, I admit, I do use choice time. They either get “5 minutes” taken away or
they end up having to choose their center last & they know this. Sometimes I
forget when I have told someone they’ve lost some of their center time & the
kids remind me…”Miss Roque, remember “he” did that, so he goes last” or they
just remind each other w/out even having to tell me.

For me, their behavior is their responsibility, even at 5 years old. It is also
something I know that is constant…from the very first day of school…to the
last.”

What are your thoughts about this?

Hurt No Living Thing

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In spite of the tumultuousness of caring for twenty to thirty children each day, teaching can be a rather solitary profession. Teachers are busy in their own rooms and rarely get the chance to visit the rooms of our colleagues, particularly during class time. I spent some time in Adele Schroeter’s 4th grade classroom, because her class and mine were buddy-classes, in Connie Norgren’s first grade room because for five years we did a modified version of team teaching and in Phyllis Allen and Bill Fulbrecht’s kindergarten class because we often planned together and combined our classes for periodic group singing. Those were pretty much the classrooms in my school that I was very familiar with.

After retiring as a classroom teacher I began working as a literacy consultant. In this capacity, I have had the opportunity to visit classrooms in all different communities in New York City. There are so many times when I wish I could go back into my classroom to try out some of the wonderful instructional ideas that teachers shared with me on my visits. However, there’s one thing that I saw in so many classrooms that both surprised and upset me – all different forms of behavior management charts.

The use of behavior management charts in early childhood classrooms seems to be much more common than I ever realized. Some charts involve stars or stickers. Many of them seem to be color-coded. From what I can gather, the goal of most of them is to keep children under control.

I definitely understand how important and challenging it is for teachers to maintain a calm atmosphere in the classroom. It can be disturbing for the teacher and for the students when there are children who constantly exhibit disruptive behaviors.

How well I remember those evenings when I returned home from work, carrying in my head the name and image of some particular child. After a day at work, I could still hear the voice of a child who spent a good part of the day pushing me to the edge of my patience!

As challenged as I was ten years ago, today’s teachers have so much more that they must deal with. In my observations of kindergarten, first and second grade classes over these past few years, it is evident how many more children there are who might be labeled “discipline problems” or, even more extremely, children with ADHD. Today’s educators are faced with a myriad of unfair obstacles. Teachers who once worked with teaching assistants are now, because of budget cutbacks, without any classroom help. In addition to adjusting to new curriculum demands they also have larger classes. Most classrooms include children with diagnosed and undiagnosed special needs.

I think that it’s impossible not to consider the impact that the academic take- over of the early childhood curriculum, concurrent with the implementation of the Common Core Learning Standards and benchmarks is having on the school life of the young child. This phenomenon has created teaching schedules filled with long stretches of sitting, listening, reading and writing. There are few opportunities for children to experience play and exploration, creating a climate in which an increase in behavioral issues is no surprise. The Scottish psychologist, R. D. Laing believed that some mental dysfunctions that patients with psychosis exhibited were often understandable responses to difficult life experiences. Perhaps we can make an analogy and say that the aggressive classroom behaviors of some active young children are reactions to some of the developmentally inappropriate practices that fill their days.

Taking all of this into account, I understand the appeal of using a visual rewards system for keeping behavior in check. This might, on a very short term, have some positive effect on controlling classroom behavior. However, there are some important questions to be asked.

Are children learning to internalize acceptable social behaviors with this chart or are they only exhibiting these behaviors in exchange for a reward? Are we, unintentionally, labeling children the “good” children in the class and the “bad” children in the class? Are the more dutifully behaved children becoming anxious about the possibility of being moved to a negative spot on the chart? Are the charts giving teachers important information about why children are acting out? (Perhaps a child is bored with the work. A child might have had a traumatic incident at home that evening or morning. A child might be hungry. A child might physically need more opportunities to move around freely.) Is this chart helping to develop a caring classroom community?

Because of the challenges of teachers and children face each day, it is even more crucial to spend time establishing a classroom community that is built on trust, respect, cooperation and student empowerment. I believe that an important goal for teachers is to establish a democratic and responsive classroom community. This is, by no means, an easy task but the results prove well worth all of the teacher’s time and effort. Sir Ken Robinson, in his book Finding Your Element, writes, “ When communities create shared ideas, values and patterns of behavior, they create a culture. What you make of what lies within you is affected by the culture you are a part of: by what it encourages and discourages, permits or forbids.”

The use of public behavior tracking charts can, in effect, act counter to the goal of creating the kind of community that I think most teachers desire. Rather than giving children a positive message, tracking children’s behavior on a chart displayed on a bulletin board sends and unspoken negative message that someone in this class is likely going to misbehave. Children begin to focus on where they are on this chart and how they compare to other children in the class. They think about who is always “bad” and who is “good” in the room. An element of stress is passed on to all the children. Children who tend to be more physically active begin to develop negative self-image because their behavior invariably puts them in the “misbehaving” category. This public display that rates a child’s behavior becomes a means of possibly causing shame, stress, and feelings of defeat.

I have noticed that the classrooms I visit with the most stable and calmest communities are classrooms where teachers have not used behavior charts or other methods of doling out rewards and punishments as a means of maintaining classroom order. For example, when I bring visitors to Pam Roque’s kindergarten classroom at P.S. 142 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, everyone is immediately impressed by the noticeable independence and cooperation among her children. When I was last in her room, I looked around for a behavior chart but couldn’t find one. I asked Pam about this and she said that she never used one. It just wasn’t the way that she wanted to conduct her class. I did notice that the room was arranged and conducted so that the children would develop independence. The room is not cluttered with teacher’s paraphernalia and centers were set up so that children could access materials easily. At class meetings, it’s easy to sense how interested Pam is in children’s comments and observations. She is a good listener and gives children time to think about their questions and answers. This respect for everyone’s contributions is a positive role model for the children’s own behaviors.

My first year as a literacy consultant, I worked in a public school in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. Being new to this work, I felt rather anxious and not quite sure yet about the parameters of my role. One of my first assignments was to help a new first grade teachers learn how to conduct guided reading groups. The teacher, Rob Catlin (now the principal of the River East School, a progressive NYC public school), had a very challenging class. Many children were living under difficult conditions and some began the day exhibiting angry and aggressive behaviors. Rob, however, had received training in Responsive Classroom strategies, which he employed at his morning meetings. At first I would impatiently wait for these long meetings to end so that we could get started on our reading work. However after sitting through a few of these morning sessions, I could see the wonderful community building that was taking place and literally see the children begin to relax and smile. They shared important information about themselves and commented on each other’s reflections. They were becoming a caring and respectful community.

In my own classrooms I never had a particular program that I followed but I did have some routines that might have encouraged empathy and cooperation. . In place of a list of rules, we learned and discussed in great detail the poem Hurt No Living Thing by Christina Rossetti. This poem became the basis of our code for classroom behavior. The simple words of the poem really contained everything that we needed to know about what could and couldn’t be done in school. What does it mean to hurt someone? Have you ever been hurt? How did it feel? Have you ever felt hurt inside? What do you think made you feel that way? When we opened up this kind of conversation, we really were talking about sensitivity and respect. The words to the poem were, of course, revisited often during the school year, each time with greater depth of understanding.

Hurt no living thing:
Ladybird, nor butterfly,
Nor moth with dusty wing,
Nor cricket chirping cheerily,
Nor grasshopper so light of leap,
Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat,
Nor harmless worms that creep.

About halfway through the school year we would begin collecting “Acts of Kindness” which were dictated to me or written by children and posted on a classroom bulletin board. At first, noticing kind acts was a big challenge for the children. They wanted me to post their own acts of kindness but on this board we posted acts of kindness that we noticed others doing. After a while everyone was on the lookout for signs of kind acts AND they wanted others to notice their kind acts! The board kept filling up with sticky notes describing different kind acts in our classroom, in the lunchroom, in the playground, in the schoolyard and….every once in a while, acts of kindness that they noticed at home!

Each week children took on different classroom jobs. One of the jobs was to be the class comforter. The child who had that job would comfort a classmate who was in distress. This could be someone having separation issues, a classmate who fell in the schoolyard, or someone who was having difficulty calming down in class. The act of being a comforter didn’t happen automatically for all children. We did much role-playing, discussion, sharing of how they were comforted by parents, and also what made them feel better when they were upset. We even had a “Comfort Song” that my good friend and colleague, Connie Norgren, taught me. (What do I do when my ____________is crying? What do I do? What do I say? I take my ______________in my arms and hold him) We sometimes even sang about comforting our pets or our grandparents. The children took this song very seriously!

My classroom also had our Cozy Reading Room, a painted refrigerator box with an arched door cut out and some nice soft pillows to sit on inside. Two children sometimes snuggled up in here to read books or share stories with each other. This also became a spot where the class comforter would do his or her magic to comfort the child in distress.

I would like to say that I didn’t give children time in a “time out” chair but that would be an untruth. I did follow a rule that I once read somewhere, “as many minutes as the child’s age.” Nevertheless, to my horror, I once overheard a conversation that had a profound effect on my use of time outs. A parent was picking up a particularly active child at the end of the school day and she asked him how his day was. “Really good,” he told her. “I didn’t have any time out.” Oh my! I became very aware of not overusing this strategy again! The clinical psychologist, Dr. Laura Markhan wrote in an article to parents the “Timeouts make kids see themselves as bad people, …don’t help kids learn emotional regulation.” Mea culpa! If I could only go back and do things differently…but how?

Nikki Sabiston , in her blog entry, Why I Will Never Use a Behavior Chart Again, describes the Take-A –Break Space. The idea is that a child has an opportunity to cool down or remove him/herself from a stressful situation by going to some area in the classroom that is set aside just for this purpose. It’s non-punitive. The child decides when he or she is ready to rejoin the group. It sounds like a reasonable, more sympathetic alternative to a time out chair and it carries with it the assumption that the child can reflect on his/her behavior and learn to self-monitor.

Realistically speaking, there could be a time when a child might need an individual behavior plan, but this intervention certainly shouldn’t be punitive or long term. I had one opportunity to do this and it seemed to have successful results.

Larry (not his real name) was a challenging child. He knew how to push everyone’s buttons. When he came to my kindergarten class he was repeating the grade. His former teacher passed on this information to me, “Larry has no interest in learning anything.” Well this, I discovered quite quickly, was not true. Larry was very bright, loved anything to do with mathematics, could stick with a project for long periods of time if he was totally engaged with it, but also had, it seemed, a lot of pent up anger and also difficulty controlling his temper. I stayed with this group of children for two years, kindergarten and first grade. By the middle of first grade Larry had worn me down. I knew that I had to try something new with him.

Here is what I already knew. We were a very tight classroom community. Almost all of the parents found ways to support our classroom activities. A caring but very young mother who had three young, very active children was raising Larry. Larry’s father was incarcerated (although I was not supposed to know this. I discovered it by observing and listening to Larry when he was playing in the block center.) It was my hunch that Larry was pretty desperate for his mother’s attention and that he was anxious about his father’s condition. I couldn’t do very much about the situation with his father but I had an idea of how to somehow reach his mother. I set up a parent-teacher meeting and told her about my concerns for Larry. She was aware of his behavioral difficulties in school. She was living with the same behaviors at home and she, too, was at the end of her tether.

It was my belief that Larry was craving individualized attention from his mother. He wanted her all for himself and that wasn’t happening. I came up with a plan that I shared with Larry’s mom and she agreed to find a way to uphold her part of it. My next job was to share the plan with the class. I managed to arrange for Larry to be out of the room and I called a class meeting. I told the children that I was aware of the problems that they were having when Larry lost control of his behavior and I thought that we could all help him to find better ways of dealing with situations that upset him. The children listened quite attentively as I told them of my plan. I said that I was going to tell Larry that I was setting up a point system for him. Whenever I noticed that he was having a good day, or part of a day, I would give him a point. When he got twenty points, he was going to get a special treat. (What I did not tell the class is that the treat was going to be a trip to the ice cream parlor with his mother…just him, not his sister, not his brother. Only Mom and Larry, having a special time together.) We discussed ways that they could help Larry. If they noticed that he was getting frustrated, they would step in to help him out. They would compliment him whenever they could. They would be sure to ask him to join in their games in the schoolyard and tell him what a good job he was doing at the game before he had an opportunity to lose his temper. They would find times to ask him for help if it was something they knew he could help them with. These were all ideas that the children came up with.

That day I spoke with Larry about the point plan and told him about what his special reward would be. I told him that the class knew that we were doing this but that he was the only one responsible for getting the points. We were off and running.

Everything worked out better than I expected! The children did all that they could do to make school life easier and more successful for Larry. With each new conflict-free day, I could almost see Larry’s tense body relaxing. The children felt so pleased with the way that Larry was interacting with them.

Finally, Larry earned his 20 points. It was an exciting moment for him and for the class but a big disappointment followed. His mother told me that it was just too much for her to spend that time going out with him without taking the other two children. I just couldn’t convince her of how important it was. Somehow I managed to fudge some excuse but I suggested to Larry that we go out for a pizza lunch together and then go for an ice cream dessert. This seemed to make him happy. We told the class about our plan and everyone seemed quite pleased.

At lunch in the pizzeria I noticed that Larry was taking little pieces of the crust and setting them aside on a napkin. One, two, three…until he counted up to 23. “What are you doing?” I asked him. Larry looked up at me from his counting. “I’m bringing something back for my friends in school.”

We didn’t do the points again and Larry seemed to be having an easier time for the rest of the school year. Something between him and the other children changed and they appeared to become aware of how important their help was to him. I even noticed that some of the families were inviting him over for playdates after school.

It took quite a while for me to resort to a point reward system in my work with Larry. We had many talks, time outs and parent-teacher meetings before I resorted to this approach. In retrospect, I think that this plan would not have worked if I hadn’t first spent so much time supporting the development of a strong classroom community. It was this community of caring children that helped Larry deal with some of his challenging classroom behaviors.

A caring community and respect for each individual’s self-esteem – two essential goals as important as any other part of the curriculum in any early childhood classroom.

A Teaching-Out-Of-The-Box Quilt

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My friend Robin visited yesterday. She’s a radio personality who approaches life with an impressive force and energy. We began to talk about the state of education and Robin came up with an interesting idea. Robin grew up in Baltimore and had a challenging home life. It was school, she emotionally said, that really saved her. As we sat around the table eating dinner, we shared stories about teachers who made huge impressions on us because of their ability and determination to think and teach out of the box.

Robin thought that a great many people must have examples of how creative teachers had major impacts on their lives.She suggested that, in the style of the Aids Quilt, we begin a project where we piece these stories together – one story to another, to another, to another…. making a sort-of story quilt consisting of examples of lives affected by creative, caring, non-script-teaching professionals. She thought that it would be a perfect response to the type of teaching- to- the- test mentality that is driving education today.

I’m pretty excited about the idea but I don’t know how to get it started. What are your thoughts? Wouldn’t it be great to have these stories printed up, attached together, and hung in some public spot? Am I thinking too big or crazy?

What do you think?

Taking Ownership

4 Replies

2 hands

It’s difficult to make changes. This is particularly true when the change is not self-imposed.

Last fall I began work as a consultant in an elementary school in East New York, Brooklyn. For the past eight years the early childhood teachers at this school were using the Core Knowledge program as the foundation of their instruction. Most lessons were spelled out for them in a teacher’s guide and they had a structured pacing calendar to follow throughout the school year. This curriculum covered topics in science and social studies.

The kindergarten topics for the year were “Taking Care of Body”, “Seasons and Weather”, “Magnetism”, “Animals Throughout the Year”, “Plants”, “Care of Earth with a focus on Continents”, “Maps, Towns, City States. – as a possible link to early civilizations”, “Across the months, continents and oceans,” “Pilgrims,” “Early Settlement,” “Presidents, Symbols and Figures, July 4th,” “Native American-Eastern Woodland,” and “Africa.”

The first grade topics for the year were “Human Body: Jenner, Human Body: Pasteur,” “Seasons,” “Electricity, Edison, Magnets/Magnetism,” Living Things,” Living Things’ Environment,” “Solar System,” “The Earth,” “Matter/Properties of Matter,” “Early civilizations, “ “The World Around Us, Maps, Continents,” “Colonial America,” “American West, Westward Expansion,” and “Biographies from the American Revolution.”

I’m not sure of how inclusively the curriculum was covered over the course of a school year. However “covered” seems like the crucial word here. In my opinion, most of these topics don’t seem to be areas that can be significantly explored by 5 and 6 year old children.

This also became clear to the principal of the school and she was determined to do something about this situation. One of her first grade teachers (actually a former kindergarten student of mine!) brought in to school and shared a New York Times article about some early childhood consulting work that I was doing in a school in Manhattan. The article focused on a class trip to a parking garage as part of a class exploration of cars.

After reading the article, the director, Michelle Bodden-White, invited me to visit her school and have a discussion with her early childhood staff about the possibility of making changes in their instructional approach. She wanted them to move towards a more inquiry and project based curriculum.

The staff was, understandably, skeptical, particularly the first grade teachers. They were afraid that they would not be covering materials that were aligned with the Common Core Learning Standards. Ms. White and I assured them that this would not be the case and that a well-developed inquiry project could meet the standards as well as the Core Knowledge program. However, they are a very committed group of educators. They were fearful of ultimately short-changing their students. The reality of the situation, though, was that the school’s past test scores were not very high. Children were not having positive social interactions and there did not seem to be a lot of professional collaboration among the staff.

I officially began my work in the fall but I don’t think that any really significant changes took place until the winter. The turning point was when the teachers had the opportunity to visit the school in the lower east side, observe the inquiry work being done in classrooms and speak very openly with the P.S. 142 teachers about shared challenges, anxieties and hopes.

What I’m going to share with you now is an example of how two of the first grade teachers, following the visit to P.S. 142 and after debriefing with me, took the Car Study and made it one that engaged the children in their class and satisfied the teachers goals of addressing the Common Core Learning Standards. The first grade staff decided to do a car study because they thought that the topic would engage the children. Also, the school is located in a neighborhood that is an Industrial Park. There are many auto repair shops in walking distance and this would allow for a variety of field trips.

From my point of view, these teachers took important and brave steps forward in their professional growth. Previously they had been working with fairly scripted lesson plans. Now, without a script to follow, it was as though they were walking on a tightrope without a safety net and balancing themselves very well at that! Rather than following a script, they were following the lead of the children, listening carefully to their observations and questions and using this information to plan trips and activities.

Last week I had my last consulting day for this year. We met to discuss challenges, successes, hopes, and fears. The teachers (all eight on the grade) agreed that the children were very engaged during the Car inquiry study and were quite excited about the many field trips. (I often emphasized to the teachers that the field trips were their primary resources and that they would be the inspiration for further investigations.) Children were enthusiastically writing because their writing was in the service of their investigations and projects. They were reading books to do research. The teachers noted that the children were now taking ownership of their own learning, engaging in group planning and were more articulate in their observations and questions. They also noted that there were no behavior problems when children were working on the inquiry study!

Here are some pages from the teachers’ journal, documenting different aspects of the study.

The children found this in the street this week. Now they’re coming up with plans for turning it into a car! They’re figuring out what parts they will need and how they can split up into groups to work on it. It’s a wonderful project for the end of the school year!

With special kudos to Katie Rust, Maria Soehngen, Karen Romagna, Regina Fallah-Hausman, Shana Brown, Janaya cordy, Davin Aebisher, Julie Steiner, Michelle Bodden-White and Hannah Brooks.

Two weeks ago I read an article in a New York City newspaper, geared to teachers, written by a kindergarten teacher about the importance of Choice Time . That should have pleased me. For quite some time I’ve been an advocate of keeping play and exploration in the early childhood curriculum. Yet I found this piece to be disturbing. Why?

First of all, the writer of this article states that the Common Core Standards are “developmentally appropriate and provide an in-depth, detailed guide for what must be mastered in kindergarten…” Once we outline a detailed guide for kindergarten mastery we are immediately off –base. As the authors of Developmentally Appropriate Practice write, educators of kindergarten children need to, “meet children where they are as individuals and as a group.” Micromanaging what all kindergarten children must master by the end of a school year is contradictory to what we know about how young children develop and about what we need to do to support their creative, social and intellectual development. I’m not implying that we should not have high standards for all children. We do not need to have a checklist of how, what and when children need to meet very specific academic benchmarks.

Another problem that I had with this article is that there is an assumption that children will need to be motivated to become engaged in centers and that the teacher will need to “clearly model how each center works.” The writer gives an example of what might be modeled to introduce the Read-Along (listening) center and how the minilesson would align this center with the Common Core. The teacher suggests telling the children that after they listen to a story “they will fill in a simple beginning, middle and end worksheet and retell the story with friends at the center. The students are encouraged to practice using the five Ws (who, what, when, where and why) when they are retelling.”

Choice Time is not a time to give children tasks. It should be an opportunity for children to direct their own play and therefore, their own learning. The teacher carefully sets up centers with materials that provoke investigations but it is the child who discovers ways of using the materials. When interest in a center wanes, then it opens up a few possibilities. It might be time to retire that center (at least for the time being.) Perhaps the teacher could present the children with her observations of how she has noticed a lack of interest in the center. The children might come up with ideas for “remodeling” that area to make it more interesting. They could brainstorm for different ways that the center could be used; what might take place at that activity? Perhaps at the Read-Along center the children might suggest having drawing paper so that they could draw pictures that the story brought to mind. The teacher might suggest adding blank tapes to the center so that children could tell and record stories for other children to hear. On the other hand, they might agree that the center is no longer interesting to them and suggest putting it away.

One year when my kindergarten class was in the midst of a long and exciting study of bridges I noticed that the bridge constructions were becoming more and more intricate, taking up all of the space in the block center. Abutting this area was our very under-utilized dramatic play center. I thought that it might make sense to close up the dramatic play area and extend the block center. I was so sure that the children would appreciate this change since they practically never went into dramatic play during this period. I shared my thoughts with the class and to my great surprise there was an uproar of dissent. Absolutely nobody wanted me to take away what we called “the pretend center”. One child suggested that we make it a smaller pretend center. I questioned whether there would be anything that they could do in a small pretend center but the children thought that it could be a little store. After two days of discussions, it was decided that we would open up a little bookstore and that we could make the block area a little bit bigger. Unexpectedly, we were now beginning a mini-inquiry study of bookstores!

We visited a bookstore in the neighborhood, interviewed the workers and the bookstore owner, sketched and discussed the arrangement of the books in the store and stood outside the store observing, drawing and photographing how the store looked from the street. A few weeks were spent transforming the dramatic play area into a bookstore. Because it was a little bookstore, children who chose the writing center were busy writing little books. Our classroom library was searched for little books to add to the store collection. Children built an awning, made signs, constructed a cash register and made paper money, and wrote labels for the shelves, organizing the little books by subjects (just as they saw when they visited the neighborhood bookstore.) This exciting curricula detour lasted a few weeks and shows what can happen when children are challenged to consider and solve a classroom problem.

Choice time is not a part of the kindergarten program because it is in service of meeting the Common Core Learning Standards. Choice Time is part of the kindergarten program because it is essential that children have opportunities to play, investigate, explore, socialize, collaborate, think out of the box, play with a box, create…. have fun!

New Study Tour to Reggio Emilia

Hope!

Once Upon A Time

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Once upon a time there were Three Billy Goats Gruff. They wanted to go over the bridge to the other side of the canal to get to the diner that sold some great grassburgers . The first billy goat, the littlest one went trip- trap- trip- trap over the swing bridge.

This script was written and performed by some of my kindergarten students about 14 years ago. We were immersed in a bridge study and had recently visited the three movable bridges that spanned the nearby Gowanus Canal. We also read lots of traditional folk tales that year. Both studies worked their way into this wonderful play that a group of the children wrote during Choice Time. The entire class acted it out for their families during our end of year celebration.

As I reflect on this whimsical production, my mind wanders to the new Common Core Learning Standards and the anxiety that I encounter around these standards when I consult in various New York City schools. I’m not about to defend the Common Core Standards. I really do believe that we can have high standards for our students without having some outside “educators” micromanage every learning point that we are responsible for teaching. However, I do think that we can interpret many of these standards in ways that make sense for young children.

Here are some ideas that I have for implementing a kindergarten folktale study that isn’t planned specifically to address the Common Core Learning Standards but that seems to meet them anyway. This isn’t a checklist of how to do a folktale study and it’s not a teacher’s script. I’m just describing some of the possibilities. The beauty of teaching is often in the excitement of that serendipitous moment when children become intrigued with some part of a story and the teacher and class take time to dig in for a deep exploration. Allowing for, and even encouraging, detours that are driven by a child’s question or observation, are so fundamentally important to creating a vital learning environment. I’ve outlined some possibilities for planning a folktale study but don’t’ forget to listen to the children and enjoy revisiting these tales through their fresh eyesight and youthful innocence.

The Common Core Learning Standards
A Folktale study will address many of the kindergarten common core learning standards for literature. Here are some of the Common Core Learning Standards that might be met by implementing a folktale study:

• With prompting and support from the teacher, children will have opportunities to ask and answer questions about key details in a text
• With prompting and support from the teacher, children will have opportunities to retell familiar stories, including key details and also identify character, settings, and major events in a story,
• With prompting and support from the teacher, children will have opportunities to ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text
• With prompting and support from the teacher, children will have opportunities to recognize common types of texts (e.g. storybooks and poems)
• With prompting and support from the teacher, children will have opportunities to actively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understanding.
• With prompting and support from the teacher, children will be able to describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts)
• With prompting and support from the teacher, children will have opportunities to compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in familiar stories.

Some rationales for teaching a folktale study early in the kindergarten school year
A folktale study:
• Introduces young children to the joys of traditional children’s literature
• Helps children develop a rich vocabulary
• Helps build an inviting, appropriate classroom library.
• Provides opportunities for meaningful discussions
• Encourages children to extend their understanding of literature through art, music, drama and play.

Introducing a study of The Three Little Pigs
• The teacher reads many versions of The Three Little Pigs over the course of one or more weeks
• Posing open-ended questions that encourage children to synthesize the ideas in the book and theorize on possible outcomes facilitates discussions. For example:

-How might you have built your house if you were one of the pigs and you wanted to protect yourself against the wolf?

-Why would you build it that way?

-What do you think it means when we describe someone as clever? (This might not be a word that children are familiar with and could involve some defining by the teacher after children have a go at figuring it out)

-Have you noticed any examples of clever thinking on the part of the pigs or the wolf in the story?

– Why do you think the mother pig sent the little pigs out into the world by themselves?

-How do you think the little pigs felt about leaving home?
• Children can be encouraged to make connections to incidents in their own lives and in other stories by referring to the pictures in the text for support. When children see the pigs hiding in fright from the wolf behind the door, it could open up a discussion of times when they were frightened and how they handled their fright. When the pigs trick the wolf into going apple picking at the wrong time, it might remind children of tricks that they played on friends or siblings. On the other hand, it might also begin a conversation about times that they, too, went apple picking! Straying from the story plot and remembering a family trip to an apple orchard could be a fairly typical connection for a five-year old to make in response to the apple-picking illustration.

Class Discussion
The teacher’s line of questioning determines the quality of the discussion.

• Initially, simple factual questions might be asked such as, “ What did the three pigs use to build their homes?”
• After asking simple questions, more thought-provoking inquiries could be asked such as “I wonder why the wolf was so easily fooled by the pigs?”

When open-ended questions are posed, the teacher does not expect children to arrive at one definitive answer. A key point here is that all theories are debatable and worthy of discussion. This supports higher-level thinking and richness of language. Open-ended questions can tap into children’s curiosity, sense of wonder and ability to attempt some creative thinking. When the teacher asks open-ended questions, children are presented with a message that says, “I trust you to have good ideas and I value your thoughts.”

Drama and Play
All of these supports inspire children to interact with the text using age-appropriate modes of exploration.

• The teacher can encourage children to refer to illustrations when they are reconstructing the story as they play in the various Choice Time centers. This can be done by adding copies of the book to the dramatic play center and to the block center. A book may also be put in the art center.
• Photocopies of illustrations from the book can also be posted in easy view in these centers too.
• Teachers can make story props available. Small models of animals from the story can be put in the block center.

After hearing many versions of the same folktale

• The class could create a Venn diagram, showing similarities and differences in the various versions of the story. For example, there are always three pigs but perhaps in one story, instead of going to pick apples, they go to pick cherries!
• Children might create personal versions of the story in their writing workshop. Four and five year olds would probably begin with drawings. Children could dictate the text to the teacher, or if they are ready to use invented spelling they could write it themselves.
• These new versions could first be displayed on a bulletin board in the classroom and later turned into class books.
• The teacher could document this writing process by photographing children working on their books and recording brief transcripts of children’s thoughts and comments as they work.
• These photos and children’s comments could be added to the wall display, which would serve as a visible assessment of the learning process.
• At independent and partner reading, children should have time to “reread” the books to each other. At this stage in their literacy development, they will probably be retelling the story using picture clues and the memory of having heard the book read aloud.
• As children read, the teacher sits at the side of a child to engage the student in a book discussion.
• These one-on-one discussions give the teacher the opportunity to hear if the child is using storybook language, following the sequence of the story, speaking in complete sentences and remembering significant expressions from the story (i.e “not by the hair of my chinney chin chin”).
• These conferences provide the teacher with invaluable information for future lesson planning and for differentiating instruction.
• If there is a big book version of the story, this can be used for shared reading.
• A small copy of a folktale book can be used for shared reading by projecting the book onto the wall or Smartboard. If the school does not have a document projector, an overhead projector can be used with transparencies of each page.
• Shared reading gives children opportunities to ask and answer questions about key details in the text, retell this familiar story, including key details and identify character, settings, and major events in the story, with the support of the group.
• Shared reading scaffolds the retelling and reenacting of the story that will take place during Choice Time and independent reading.
• For kindergarten children, singing is a joyful and crucial part of their school experience.
• The class might compose a Three Little Pigs song, using a popular tune or by making up an original tune!
• The teacher could act as scribe, recording the words to the song.
• This class-composed song could become one of the songs that would be sung throughout the year!
• After children know the song “by heart” the song chart can be used for shared reading as they sing along.
• Reciting poetry can be another way to make connections to the story.
• Young children have for generations recited Mother Goose poems. To Market, To Market could first be learned as a playful chant. As children learn the poem the teacher can help them understand some of the unfamiliar vocabulary such as “hog” and “jig”. (The children might also try dancing a jig to some appropriate music!)
• What was first learned as a chant can now be transferred to a shared reading chart. Because children know the poem “by heart”, they will be ready to make connections to some of the significant words that are written on the chart.

To market, to market
To buy a fat pig;
Home again, home again,
Dancing a jig.
To market, to market
To buy a fat hog;
Home again, home again,
Jiggety-jog.

• In a shared writing experience, children might dictate a new class version of a folktale (or create an entirely new tale, using the folktale format!).
• Individual groups of children can illustrate each page of the new version of the folktale that the class created, matching their drawing to the words on the page. When these pages are completed, the class will have an original Big Book version of the story. This version can be revisited many times for shared reading and dramatic presentations.
• Informational texts that match the story can be read to the children.
• During a study of The Three Pigs, the teacher might read Gail Gibbons’ informative text, Pigs.
• Children could be encouraged to make connections between the attributes of real pigs compared to the pigs in the folktale.
• Some other nonfiction books to read might be “Pigs! Learn About Pigs And Learn To Read – The Learning Club!” and Pigs (First Step Nonfiction Farm Animals) by Robin Nelson
• The introduction of a new folk tale such as The Three Billy Goats Gruff could follow up the study of The Three Pigs.
• Reading a variety of folktales provide a perfect opportunity for comparing and contrasting adventures and experiences of different characters.
• The Three Pigs and the Three Billy Goats Gruff all had to use their creative intelligence to overcome obstacles. How might you describe the similarities and differences in these obstacles? Did you notice any similarities or contrasts in the ways that the bad guys in both stories were outsmarted? The possibilities for discussion are endless!
• Because of all the opportunities for comparisons to be made between the two tales, the conversation would most likely become even more complex than proposed by the Common Core Standards!

“Helping children engage in the drama of reading, helping them become dramatist (rewriter of the text), even critic (commentator and explicator and scholarly student of the text), is how I think of our work as teachers of reading.”
Aidan Chambers
Tell Me: Children Reading and Talk

“Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”
John Steinbeck

SARAH’S RESPONSE

3 Replies

So many of you have written to ask me if I ever heard from Sarah, the young teacher who was upset and overwhelmed by the data-driven curriculum her administration was forcing on her, her colleagues and her students. Well, I did hear from her this week and I thought that I would share her second email with you.

What are your thoughts about Sarah’s interpretation of the job that colleges are doing in preparing (or not preparing) students for the teaching work ahead of them? I do have my own thoughts on this, but before sharing them, I’d like to hear your opinions.

Here is Sarah’s email to me:

Hi Renee,

I wanted to reply and tell you thank you! I am so sorry that I have not had a chance to respond to your email or write on your blog!

Thank you truly from my heart for your and your colleagues for their words of inspiration! I am leaving the school where I work. I am also moving home to Cincinnati! I am originally from Cincinnati.

I’m really looking forward to reading more in your upcoming blog posts! It will certainly be helpful as I begin the next phase in my career. I’m still not sure what type of work I will be doing next. I love learning about reading and the learning process. Maybe a master’s degree so I can become a little more knowledgeable so I can tell those policymakers to stop telling us what to do! Being out in the real world and discussing with other teachers and instructional coaches has made me realize though how so many of our colleges are not competently preparing students for teaching. I think if teachers were more competently trained in the background of what goes on while a child is learning to read and write and even what goes on inside the brain when a child is learning math they would be more confident to stick up for the art of teaching. Does that make sense? How do we change this? How do we relay a message that teaching is a science and art and both are needed to educate our children? Not only do we need to change our attitudes. We need to change our environments. How much difference the environment can relay to one as they enter it. Some environments respect children and some respect the law. I think those are two clearly different perspectives.

Again thanks so much for taking the time to respond. It was an honor to be on your blog post…I certainly don’t mind at all!

Thanks so much! Have a great weekend!

Sarah

P.S. My kids will be breaking out the watercolors next week : )

Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

by: Renée Dinnerstein