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!