The Last Monday

This morning, after a breakfast of Cheerios and mangoes (success!), we sat down to circle time to talk about our community. We were joined by new full-time addition Andy and our friend Julie from the first week of Kickstart. We read Is Your Mama A Llama? and talked about different animal families. The kids were pretty engaged for a Monday morning with the exception of a very sleepy Q, who, as usual, brightened over the course of the day. Calendar time and Weather Watchers went quickly (another sunny day - our chart is almost full!) and we transitioned to a discussion about community. Who lives in our community? What places can we visit in our community? How do we stay safe in our community? Who can we trust? We made a list of community words: mom, dad, houses, police, firepeople, schools, parks, restaurants, pets, etc.

It was a gorgeous day outside, and we played a pretty intense game of tag (which the kids call "get ME!"). In the afternoon, Rani Arbo joined us for a lovely sing-a-long.

Click here for Andy's photos!

Official Week Four Update

Sorry to keep y'all waiting. Here's your re-cap of our second to last week (yelp!) of Kickstart.

On Tuesday, we had our fourth field trip of the summer to KidCity, which is a kids' museum in Middletown that essentially just did everything right. The rooms are big, bright, colorful mazes of kid-friendly, open-ended play structures and toys. There are lots of little alcoves and seats and lofts for kids to explore, and every inch of the museum is painted over with the most beautiful artwork.

In the first room, kids cook at a restaurant counter, pull levers on the back of a full-size car, sit in a jewel-and-mirror-encrusted cave, write their names in light on a dark wall, keep balls afloat above a pillar of blowing air, and maneuver a spaceship with day-glo wands.

In the apple room, they can sit on a massive pig, find and sort eggs in the chicken cages, lift apple baskets on a pulley system, climb to the top of an "apple tree" loft and pet the lift-size horse.

In the "fishery," they collect, sort and distribute red, yellow, and blue fish via a magnetized overhead conveyor belt aboard a ship (or they sequester their fish collections inside the nearby igloo).

In the next room, kids can work in the bagel shop, cook at the restaurant-style stove, flip through jukeboxes while they wait to be served at the booths, or control the traffic light above yet another steer-able car.

Upstairs in the former cornfield, they can pop their heads into the middle of train tracks, play at the dino tables, paint a fence, pick carrots, and take care of baby dolls.

Then, in the music room, they can experiment with making different sounds on metal and wood "drum" wall panels and different lengths of tubes - plus there's a slide, monkey bars, and a beautiful see-saw.

Like I said, KidCity got it right. And they open late on Tuesdays to allow for groups like us (read: not paying for tickets) to visit free of charge. We planned to stay for 45 minutes (not sure what I was thinking when I budgeted for time) but of course the kids were elated at every nook and cranny they discovered, so we stayed for nearly two hours. They all played beautifully together, respected the other groups (rather, they didn't really seem to notice anyone else, but that said, they didn't bother anyone), and they had the time of their lives. Our friend Cornelia visited and met each of the kids (we've been practicing the "Hi, my name is ___, nice to meet you!" dialogue), was persuaded to come back to school with us, and later was suckered into reading to L through most of quiet time. We like new friends.

Back at school, abandoning our hopes of fitting in circle time and centers, we immediately ate lunch and most of us crashed for quiet time. L was the exception. At one point, as I was downloading photos and came across the funniest progression of photos of K and was laughing hysterically with Cornelia and Taylor as a result, we looked up and saw L looking at us and chuckling heartily. She pointed to us and said, "It is SO funny." Bear in mind that the room was completely dark and she was hanging off the edge of her cot amid a room full of sleeping children. Anyhow, most everyone else slept HARD. It had been an active morning. In the afternoon, Sim and Sam came over from the lab to teach us Old MacDonald in sign language. We learned the signs for cow, horse, pig, dog, chicken, and farm.

Finally, on Wednesday, we sort of got back on schedule. At circle time, we read my faaaaavorite kids' book Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse. It's about a mouse named Lilly who loooves her teacher, Mr. Slinger, who wears artistic shirts and says "Howdy!" with a wink every morning (and then all of the kids cheerily repeated "howdy" and blinked furiously) and serves delicious snacks and makes Lilly want to be a teacher when she grows up. One day, though, she brings her brand-new purple plastic purse - which plays music when it is opened and carries her shiny quarters and movie-star sunglasses - to school and insists on talking about it during class. Mr. Slinger takes the purse away. Lilly then draws a mean picture of him and sneaks it into his bag. At the end of the day, though, he gives back her purse with a nice note that says "Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better." Lilly feels terrible, and goes home to write an extra-nice apology note to Mr. Slinger. Fortunately he forgives her and she is allowed to share her purse at Sharing Time.

The kids are getting to be really great at sitting still for circle time. They really engage with books and everyone (seriously, everyone) participates on some level for calendar, weather, and morning song. We've come pretty far. I'm so proud of them.

On the tail end of circle time, we talked about bugs and insects. We read The Very Quiet Cricket (sadly Macdonough's copy is broken and doesn't chirp anymore, but they didn't know what they were missing) and a new book called I Wish A Were a Butterfly about a disillusioned cricket whose feelings are hurt when the frog on Swampswallow Pond tells him that he is ugly. He eventually goes to the Wise Old One, who assures him that he is certainly not ugly and that he shouldn't care what the frog says. The cricket realizes that the opinion of a good friend (the Wise Old One) is far more valuable than that of a mean frog, and he embraces his beautiful cricket-ness. Later, before centers, we read the Very Hungry Caterpillar, which was great practice for counting, identifying foods, and understanding the caterpillar-butterfly metamorphosis. Angela visited from the lab for centers and played fabulous math games with the kids - we're turning it up a notch on the math and lit work for our last week. I started one-on-one letter practice with the kids and got through three great little sessions of practicing our names and the alphabet. I was reminded again that each of the kids has a lot to learn - we'll be kicking the letter practice into high gear too.

A had a cranky, cranky day. Like, she was RUDE. When she didn't pop up at the end of quiet time, I decided not to wake her, and she slept soundly through the rest of the afternoon. We found out at the end of the day that she had been up late the night before, which explains everything. Before she left, I took her aside and gave her a chance to own up to her bad behavior, eventually leading her to offering up apologies to her other teachers. I said, "Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better." She agreed.

Thursday was AMAZING. My friend Renee visited and began our day with some impromptu pre-breakfast yoga. Circle time was long again to avoid the rain, but went beautifully. We read Kevin Henkes' Old Bear, which gave us the chance to talk about seasons and encourage theory of mind reasoning. Then we did a rousing rendition of the morning song, during which our accumulated dolls and stuffed animals each got up and danced. Then, the very most special guest arrived: my mama! We've missed her since she left at the end of planning week, and the kids hadn't even met her yet. I warned them that she was coming and told them about how much she had helped us plan for Kickstart, and when she arrived the kids all jumped up and hugged her.

We settled back down on the circle and re-visited our yoga book. Instead of doing every pose (one for each letter), we flipped through the entire book and only did the poses that were animals. Then we practiced our animal sign language (we "taught" Ms. Randi, which is ironic because she is actually signs fluently) to Old MacDonald. Finally we read Going on a Bear Hunt, which we'll bring back next week with audio.

Anna dropped off the best snack ever: strawberries and cucumbers! We cut open the cucumbers to check out the inside ("it looks like a pickle," J observed). The kids loooved both and they all asked for more. Hmm. Wait, it's possible for kids to like fresh, colorful fruits and veggies? Maybe we could skip the ranch dressing and replace the pretzels in our lunches with a few cukes? Just a thought.

At centers, we played Panda Palace for math and made paper-plate spiders for art. We lunched, rested, and then the magic began.

Bobbie Tundermann of Summer Brook Valley Farm visited with two of her alpacas, Rory (an older white alpaca) and Duffy (a brown baby alpaca). The kids sat in awe on the grass as Mrs. T told us everything there is to know about the animals. Each child got to feed the alpacas and take them for a walk. We learned that there are 22 different colors of alpacas and that they don't have top teeth, so they can't bite. They have the softest fur EVER. The visit was really just phenomenal - couldn't have asked for anything more.

In other (less happy) news, Thursday was Taylor's last day. She is leaving us for her family vacation, which we of course understand but WE WILL MISS HER SOSOOSOOOO much. She got extra love from all of the kids, and promises to visit kindergarten often. 

update: click here for Andy's beautiful Week Four Photos!

Who knew alpacas were so kid-friendly?

For the record, though, you can't ride them.

It's been quite a week, obviously. Full-length post to come. Link to complete photo album here.

KidCity

Animals and Insects Week

Here we are, three weeks in and suddenly it feels like we're running out of time! Today was our first day of learning about animals and insects, as planned by Taylor. After free play and breakfast this morning, we had an extended (due to rain) circle time. We read The Seven Silly Eaters, one of my very favorite books from the babysitting days back in high school. It's a story about a family of seven children who each have obnoxious dietary needs - one kid only eats oatmeal without lumps, another only fresh homemade pink lemonade etc - and a harried mother who can't keep up. In the end, the kids try to cook each of their favorite foods for their mom's birthday breakfast, but make a huge mess and hide the whole thing in the oven. In the morning, the mother comes downstairs to find a big pink oatmeal-lemonade-applesauce cake. During the book, we counted as the number of children in the family grew, and we practiced remembering each of the seven names and food preferences.

Calendar time dragged on today - it took too long to go through the days of the weekend, and we're up into the numbers that the kids don't get at all (i.e. 23). When we do "weather watchers," though, they perk up and jump up to look out the window at the weather. Today was our first rainy morning.

Miss Taylor then read Counting is for the Birds, and we discussed differences and similarities between the varieties of birds. We learned about finches, chickadees, and other backyard birds. We also read Tomie dePaola's Days of the Blackbird, which was kind of a stretch of our collective attention, but the kids ended up being pretty engaged and enjoying the story.

Before lunch, we had some outdoor play time and name-writing practice in our sketchbooks. Then, after quiet time and more time outside, we decorated bird-watching binoculars (which we might use tomorrow on our field trip walk) and strung our macaroni necklaces. Miss Taylor also played a brand-new math game.

During rest time today, the team had a meeting to assess our first three weeks and discuss changes we'd like to implement for the next two weeks of the program.




These are the things we are most proud of (our "Keep" list):

• flexibility: Our schedule has to change sometimes, and we do a really good job of adjusting our plans to accomodate unexpected events of each day. The four of us (plus Anna when she's in) work seamlessly together - when one of us is having an "off" day, someone else immediately picks up the slack. 
• relationships with parents: Each of our parents feels comfortable visiting the classroom and have interacted with each of us. We've had visitors to circle time, chaperones on field trips, and one lovely Gram who brightens every morning and afternoon. 
• "make good choices": We all really like the dialogue of "choices" that we have in our classroom. Miss Felicia especially is really good at dealing with potential issues with the simple question "Are you making good choices?" 
• consistency: Another effect of having a great team dynamic is that we back each other up. When one of us establishes a rule, we'll all enforce it. 

To stop: 

• too-long circle time: Though it's good for kindergarten prep to have kids practice sitting for long periods of time, the ideal length of circle time seems to be 20 minutes. We're going to limit circle time to one book and one movement activity, and try to cut back on purposeless calendar talk. Plus, if circle time is limited to 20 minutes, we can have stricter expectations for behavior. 
• meaningless number talk: We forget sometimes that our kids are mostly 3-knowers - any work we do with numbers over 10 is really useless. We're going to focus more on counting, labeling and comparing numbers 1-10.
• picky eater rules: Our picky eaters are so frustrating. The new policy is to answer "Excuse me, I don't like this" with "Fine." They get what they get, and they can choose to eat it or leave it. We're going to emphasize the positive ("I love how you're choosing to eat that healthy fruit!"). 
• letting kids dominate: There are a couple of kids who push to the front of the crowd and always shout out answers, and we're going to work on gently reminding those kids to let others have a turn to answer. Maybe during circle time, we'll go around the circle when we ask for helpers or answers, so that everyone is sure to get a chance. 
• flexibility in quiet time: New rule is that you pick out three books, you lie down, and you don't move. Honestly that's always been the rule, but we're bringing it back. 

To start: 

• math and literacy check-ins: To make sure that each child is getting sufficient math and reading/writing time each day, Taylor and I are going to work one-on-one with each of our students every day for 5-10 minutes. We'll work on cardinality and practice letters, numbers and counting. We'll note each child's progress each day.
• more free play and more structured dramatic play: We're going to encourage kids to come up with complex scenarios to act out after having discussed and planned steps for achieving each imaginary task. 
• more math games: Enough said - the lab has a billion amazing math games and we need to bring them in. 

Tomorrow is KidCity. Photos coming soon from today!

A Field Twip to Two Westauwants

Our Thursday field trip took us down Main Street to It's Only Natural Restaurant, where the kids got to peruse menus, decorate some tables (and ... their own faces) with chalk, and walk through the kitchen. Amy showed us fresh-baked bread, giant mixers, huge shelves of spices, the dish-washing contraption, a big box of avocadoes, and the massive oven. Then, we walked to O'Rourkes, where we were met by Maureen, a former Macdonough kindergarten teacher (it showed). The kids enjoyed fresh muffins and listened to a quick talk from Brian O'Rourke, then toured the kitchen. The highlight of the whole trip, I think, was the walk-in refrigerator at O'Rourkes. The kids were SO impressed.

Andy's photos are at the end of the Week 3 album here. Enjoy!

A surprise visit...

from the BOOKMOBILE! As I learned today, there is nothing quite as beautiful as seeing kids' faces light up at the idea of a free book truck waiting outside our school. The soon-to-be-defunct ice cream truck doesn't even compare.

From Andy

Here are some photos from outside time, learning the hokey pokey, trying healthy "energy balls" (that they made themselves!), and singing with signs from the beginning of this week... Expect a lot more after the field trip to O'Rourkes and ION on Thursday!

And where do animal crackers come from? "The cracker aisle!"

This week at Kickstart, we are learning about food, healthy eating, and where in the world our snack comes from.

Yesterday we read "Eating the Alphabet" and the kids were introduced to dozens of fruits and vegetables that they'd never heard of. At our math/science center, we held a "food lab": each child tasted three varieties of apples, described them in terms of taste and texture, and then added their name to a chart displaying the apple preferences of our whole class. In the art center, we made tissue paper collages of our favorite fruits and veggies.

In the afternoon, Andy and our new friend Sam Sikder visited to help us make energy balls. Two scoops of peanut butter + honey + flax seeds + coconut + raisins + chocolate chips = huge mess and happy kids.

Today our classroom was more full than ever! Thirteen kids total. One of our students who has been MIA finally showed up, and she's lovely!

This morning at circle time, we read "Pancakes for Breakfast" and "Pancakes, Pancakes" and discussed recipes, cooking, and the various processes of acquiring ingredients (threshing wheat was a hard concept to grasp). Later, we split into two reading groups (thanks Nikki for letting us camp out in the FRC's AC) to help us better command attention during books - it turned out to be a great idea. We've been reading more and more books, and the kids seem to love them! They can't wait to pick out and devour their own books during quiet time, and it's so nice to see them get excited about reading.

Now that we've begun to talk about food, I've become really aware of what we're feeding the kids. Yesterday, Julia and I removed the butter from their breakfast trays (because honestly they were eating sugary corn muffins with jelly and did they need butter? no) and today I brought in carrots and encouraged (okay, gently forced) them all to eat at least one carrot stick. It's so easy to give them Goldfish and animal crackers for snack, but I think that I am going to make a grocery store run this weekend and stock up on a variety of fruits and veggies. Our pickiest eater LOVES fruit (it's all she eats some days), so why not give her what she wants?

Tomorrow, we're going to work in the garden with NEAT intern Adin! Stay tuned!

Week Two

Our second week of Kindergarten Kickstart, dedicated to learning about music and movement, ended yesterday. We began on Monday by talking about dance: how can we express our feelings with our bodies? With our faces? How do we use movement to tell stories? We played Simon Says, each child taking a turn to be Simon, and practiced identifying our the parts of our bodies (and avoiding Simon's tricks!). As circle time wrapped up, we played freeze dance.

Speaking of circle time, it's worth mentioning that all of the kids have begun to really participate in our calendar and weather discussions. Each child gets a turn to get up to find the day-of-the-week sticker (identified by the first letter) and stick it to our calendar. Some of the most enthusiastic kids still have trouble identifying letters though, so they are encouraged to ask help from a friend (yay, co-acting!). We also have a weather graph (we put a sticker in the appropriate column according to what the day's weather looks like), which we use to count the number of sunny/cloudy/rainy days we've had so far. At circle time, we also ask how many total days of school we've had so far, encouraging the kids to add together the number of stickers in each column. And they GET IT!

As our dance day continued, we read a book about twin girls in Bali and a dancing pig (supposedly the Balinese version of Hansel and Gretel - A now takes the book to her cot for quiet time every day, calling it "the scary book"). I was afraid that the book would be too long, but the kids all listened quietly and interacted as I read.

That afternoon, Julia's friend Gideon joined us outside for a West African dancing and drumming lesson. We talked about making beats and danced in a circle, which led nicely into Tuesday's circle time lesson about beats and music. On Tuesday morning, we found our own heartbeats, and then practiced making beats in different ways - clapping, tapping, banging, scratching, snapping, clacking - which the kids suggested in turn as we went around the circle. Later in the week during our Thursday field trip, each child had the chance to make up a clapping pattern, which the rest of the class followed.

On Wednesday, we focused on vocabulary about feelings. As the kids raised their hands and made suggestions, I wrote feeling words on the board - happy, angry, sad, scared, worried, excited, tired - and we READ them a few times. We then turned our voices off (with sign language we learned from from Sim and Sam on Tuesday) and tried expressing each feeling with our bodies - shoulders, faces, eyebrows, etc. I wish there were pictures - it was the cutest. 

Taylor made a playlist of alternately fast/slow, happy/sad songs, and we listened to each and then discussed how they made us feel. After listening with voices off, we tried dancing to match the music. Then, at our art center, the kids made a "sound mural" by "dancing" with paintbrushes. Later on Wednesday, Andy taught a movement workshop, which they LOVED. They jumped a lot, stretched a lot, and followed Andy around the room a LOT.

On Thursday, we talked about exercise, yoga, and breathing. We went through a fantastic kids' yoga book (thanks, Andy's family!) and did a yoga pose for each letter of the alphabet. In each pose, we took three deep breaths. I was SO IMPRESSED at how well the kids paid attention and held each pose. Again, such cuteness.

Field trip!

Our Thursday schedule was a little wonky - we skipped snack and walked to the CFA courtyard for a lunch picnic. Besides a slight meltdown on the way (regarding who someone was standing next to on the rope), the kids were great. They really enjoyed the picnic AND the dance workshop held in the CFA dance studio, taught by Wesleyan student Kim.

All of our kids have made incredible progress ALREADY. Our student who had been stifled in her previous classroom (the preschool dropout) is still happy - this week, she's been working on math (adding and subtracting!) in her sketchpad, and has written a few sentences of which she is extraordinarily proud. Our student who began Kickstart unable to identify letters in her name is now consistently recognizing her name and practicing writing letters every day without being prompted. She still mixes up "e" and "6", but we're getting there.

I'm stunned by the improvement in some of the kids' speech. Even after seven days of Kickstart, their sentences are longer, more descriptive, more correct. One of the kids found a toy and asked me "Is this ours?"on the playground yesterday, and I was blown away - I hadn't heard her use a possessive pronoun before. She also has discovered the power of please and thank you, and remembers her magic words every time she asks for something - which she didn't do two weeks ago.

We had a new student this week, who modeled an act of bucket-filling that has now been incorporated into everyone's playground behavior. She invited another kid to take a swing, and proceeded to push her on the swing for a few minutes - then asked her very diplomatically to move on and give up the swing to another child. And then she kept pushing! Her name is Q, and she's a gem. Now it's like a huge privilege to get to push another kid on a swing. It's very lovely.

A couple of our quieter students have begun to come out of their shells, especially on the playground. Outside, they're much more talkative and play more readily with the other kids. We've also found that one of our students - perhaps one of the most challenging just because she's so shy - tends to brighten up right at the end of the day as the other kids are leaving. Maybe she's overwhelmed by the crowd - hopefully next week we can try to use the FRC classroom to break up the kids into smaller groups to eliminate that element of overwhelmedness.

Best. Pwends.

A and L have become BEST PWENDS, says A. She unfortunately still doesn't always remember L's name, and she tends to crowd her, but we're trying to let the friendship blossom while still reminding everyone to respect personal space. Whenever the two are separated, A melts down. Anna suggested that one of the team elects to be A's go-to nurturer/disciplinarian, so next week, if one of those meltdowns begins, A will always know who to go to. That way, we'll be able to deal with the situations in a consistent way, and hopefully learn to prevent them.

You can find Andy's photos here.

The kids are delightful, and we're all having a blast. Stay tuned - more details of the week to come!