Star Moon Drummers: The genesis of a small group name and the importance of rhythm to children.

As most of you know, my first profession was as a singer. I prided myself on being able to read complex rhythms, and to sing them with accuracy. I noticed throughout my career that many singers (and church organists, by the way) did not "get" complex rhythm patterns easily. No need to analyze that phenomenon. I leave it to music educators. But in preschool, rhythm patterns mean much more than most preschool teachers give them credit for.

Last week my small group needed to come up with a name. Children come into this with different ideas, many animals, and increasingly, media favorites. One boy wanted us to be the "minions"! A teacher said that "Gail's Minions" would be pretty cool! But I also knew that this boy had told me he was glad to be in my group because I liked drumming, and so did he. So I prompted him: "Remember you said you like to drum? Want us to be the Drummers?" That did it. Everyone wanted to be The Drummers. The next step was to find our descriptive words. One new boy said, over and over, "STAR!" Several girls said, "MOON!" in response. I was overcome. "What a beautiful name!", I said. "The STAR MOON DRUMMERS!" There was instant buy-in. We are the Star Moon Drummers. We have been drumming and scatting rhythm patterns all week.

Rhythm exploration is math. So providing drumming opportunities are an easy sell in educational circles. Rhythm work is social. The children we teach at our center become so much more organized and cooperative when they drum or use our hammock-style xylophone. Social-emotional skills are the backbone of kindergarten readiness.

Rhythm exploration is science. I hung our xylophone out this week. How may ways can you play one? I had never even thought of some of the experiments the children did. How does it sound if you crawl UNDER the xylophone and play it? How does it sound if you tip the beater back and forth, making it play with both ends? And of course, can I make a "glissando" (my term)? Heck, yes!! I did not suggest any of these alternatives, because the children are natural scientists, experimenting, processing data, coming up with new ideas and making observations. Here are some (albeit headless) photos of our children in action;

Drumming on the Playground

The xylophone is made from bed slats cut from large to small. The sound is not unlike Japanese wood blocks, The drummers soon dragged their drums over to the xylophone so that there was a sort of combo. The xylophone players looked like this...

Xylophone made out of old bed slats.

We look forward to a year of music experimentation. I will introduce videos of street drummers to this group to validate their awesome efforts on the playground. I would LOVE for them to see street drummers in person, to even participate. A field trip? Dancing to each others' drumming? Of course.

We must never underestimate the power of the arts to teach. We must not forget that, as Loris Malaguzzi said so often, in teaching we must do "Nothing without joy".

What I learned at the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance Conference--Albuquerque, Summer, 2014

I won't go into the Reggio conference itself. Needless to say I heartily recommend doing one of these splendid conferences if not actually going to Reggio Emilia (I want to!). But after listening to these amazing master-teachers for three days I came back with a renewed confidence in the children's capacity to question, analyze, and discuss.

Here is a tiny example:

On our daily walk into our building the children had formed a habit of, after picking grass with "pom poms" at the top (their term), and placing the stems of these pom-poms into holes in the cinder block walls on the way to the bathroom. Now, as any preschool teacher can tell you, if you need to walk in a line with fours, and you want them to go to the bathroom before lunch, you need to keep the line moving. No matter how much we admonished them to stop picking the grasses that were growing from the cracks in the sidewalk or along the brick wall outside the school, they stooped quickly and swiped their prizes. Once we entered the building they fondled the soft ends of these treasures...

They were kind of like this, only more scraggly!






And gradually, over days, they began to place them in the little holes along the cinder block walls leading to the bathroom. I realized that part of listening to children, a core Reggio value, was watching them and validating their interests. So during small group time I took them outside to pick grass! They were ecstatic! It was like watching a game show where a person is given the choice of a TV or a trip to Bermuda! Then we took our grasses inside to create what I called an art installation. Because it was! They loved calling it art. They told all of the other children not to touch their art! The next day we went into the classroom and found holes, which led to conversations and questions about what a hole was. If it was square, was it still a hole? Was the top of an empty butter tub a hole? And what made the holes?

Here are some of their ideas on what made holes in the cinder block:

"Someone could have been picking at the walls.""Maybe a people got sharp thing and stick it in the walls.""Because maybe they want to put a design in the walls, they get like a knife…""It could be there from like electricity wires.""There might be a nail inside and someone was trying to drill it and they kind of got it wrong.""Maybe they put a screw in the wall and then try again to put it in a different place.""Maybe some bad guys came in the school at night and drilled holes in the wall."

This wasn't the conclusion of this line of inquiry, but a tiny sample. I want to demonstrate that something teachers often (not always) see as a nuisance or distraction may be something important to a young child, and a portal to inquiry. If we don't pay attention to their interests, how can we ask them to pay attention to ours?

 

An end of the year project: Child Care, Reggio-style.

Wall display of child-designed games

We have ended our school year at our Reggio-inspired Child Care center. Our last Pre-K project was about games. The children were indignant if we didn't put out board games with activities each day, So Sue and I asked them to design their own games. Which they did with gusto! Where do you begin? Where do you end? What is the objective of the player? What are the hazards and rewards? Actually, the children knew these questions before we asked because they had internalized the idea of what a children's board game is. After designing their own board, they decided on either a die or a spinner. Creating a die was chosen by only two children, the rest loved creating a spinner, with our help. Fashioning the playing pieces ("people" they called them) involved using differently shaped wood pieces, pom-poms, small marbles, and connecting them with white glue. The children glued their players together, and, after heart-breaking discoveries in the morning ("my pieces fell apart!"), I used a glue gun to repair them. 

Then came the game tournament! We turned activity time into a gaming festival (no electronics needed)! Children played their own, and each others games. Individually, they reflected about what they liked about their games, and what they might like to change (mostly nothing...they were delighted). Sue displayed the games in our stairwell, along with the baggies of playing pieces (the baggies didn't like being on the wall, so they fell). Parents and others coming up the long two flights of stairs could admire each game, and children could narrate the story line of each.

Enter emergent literacy! When I asked each child I worked with about their game, I prompted them to tell the "story" their games told. They seemed to understand that starting somewhere, overcoming obstacles, and finishing victorious (you get the lollipops, the cloud heaven, the rainbow, or the bad guys) was a story. Children understand such concepts in a general sense. One little girl told me only, "Well, you WIN!" That was enough for her!

If we'd done this project earlier in the year, I would like to have laminated the games. But it is the time for new beginnings. These children are going to kindergarten in two weeks! The "little kids" (their term) are coming over to our side of our huge, lively space, and even younger ones are coming up from the first floor. New projects are in the future

When Pigasso Met Mootisse

This story has many admirers among art teachers. There should be more admirers among early childhood educators. It has everything! War! Grudges! Messes! Hurt feelings and most importantly: Making up. The story is based loosely upon the friendship of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, with animals subbing for the historical humans. 

The children are enthralled with super-heros and fighting, as so many children are. When I started reading When Pigasso Met Mootisse to my kids two years ago I was not convinced it would hold their attention. What I discovered was that the concept of an "art attack" hit the sweet spot in their fight-loving brains. Subsequently I also discovered that fighting for fighting's sake wasn't what they were really interested in. They were in love with the brio of the battle between opposites.  In super-hero stories, it was the battle between good guys and bad guys. In this story it is the battle between two different styles of self-expression. Feelings run very high in either case, but the idea is the same. 

So we are thinking about doing a "unit", as we say in the biz. 

The children mostly favored Picasso's style of art, which is cubism in the story. All of the blogs I've looked at show children's versions of Picasso portraits. They are way cool, folks. I applaud the teachers who give explicit directions, teach art style, and still get creative, individual results. I'm of two minds about this. I love the result. The children get away from houses, butterflies, ninjas, etc. for a while, as my friend, Angelique, says in her blog. They produce something original, with a set of learned skills and techniques. There is so much value in this. The children, as another art teacher friend has said, need to be taken seriously. On the other hand, in our program, which values process over product, we usually give materials, scaffolding, and time. We ask them for their ideas. We even wait for them. Can we resolve these two approaches? 

Should we ask them to produce their own Picassos? Or should we expose them to Picasso and give them the materials and time to see where their inspiration leads? 

What do you think?

How We Went from the Farm to a Phone Booth.

My totally cool colleagues created a phone booth for the children. How did we get to a phone booth? By emergent curriculum and the Project Approach.

Curriculum that emerges out of the interests of children and teachers has been very important to Early Childhood Education, at least in the preschool years when standardized testing has yet to make an appearance. It is a concept carefully explained in a multitude of textbooks from which I teach, and you can find many resources by googling the term. I want to describe a process from my own center, so that its example can be examined by others. Everything that emerges doesn't necessarily have to be extended or studied, but sometimes they are, and they become a project. In this case, a metamorphosizing project.


So how did a dramatic play area be transformed from a farm to a grocery store and then to a grocery store with an old fashioned (British-style) phone booth in it? Was this whimsy? Well,...yes, but read on!

In October we went on our annual field trip to the Potomac Vegetable Farm.. The children enjoyed a hayride, a walk through plantings both common and uncommon (who would have thought Coltsfoot was grown in a vegetable farm, but it is commonly used in stews in England. My teaching partner, Sue, told the children about eating it in wonderful, aromatic stews as a child growing up in Australia. We also ate cherry tomatoes straight off of the vines. Yum!)

The children enjoyed the pigs and hens. One girl almost fell into the pig pen by leaning as far out as she could. She wanted to pet a pig!
We ended with a picnic, and buying vegetables for our afternoon snack table at the center.

The dramatic play area quickly became a farm. The children made vegetables for planting, and used masking tape for rows. No, we did not use plastic vegetables. They are very colorful and fun, but they cut out a step necessary to our approach: The children need to do whatever they can to contribute to the project. We don't magically do it for them. They have ownership, an important part of self-esteem and self-efficacy. Fine motor skills get their due, without artificial activities to practice them.

After a while the farm idea got old. The children didn't play in it anymore and at the same time they began showing an interest in cooking and recipe writing. So...

I put out flower, oatmeal, sugar, salt, spices and water. I told them they needed to "write" a recipe before they cooked. So they drew pictures and invented spelling of the ingredients they wanted in their cooking, and "followed" the recipe on trays. We even put some of the concoctions into little cups, and put them in the fridge to see how they would change. The children predicted results ranging from actual cookies to "mush!". They wanted to cook again and again I decided that they needed to actually do the real thing. With Thanksgiving approaching we decided to make applesauce and pumpkin pudding. Of course they wrote recipes, first! The amazing thing about an emergent curriculum is that writing practice is painless. Children are motivated to use the tools of emergent and developmental writing when they have something they dearly want to do! Each child participates at his or her own level.

Pretend Cooking

Pretend cooking and actual cooking easily introduced the idea of where the crops go from the farm. Children are very much aware of grocery stores and what they can (and sometimes can't) get from them! They began bringing in empty cartons and containers from home. Our amazing teacher, Carrie, made shelving, and they were stocked by the children. We hauled out the toy cash registers. Did we use play money? NO! The children were more than happy to produce money at an alarming rate, and much of it had numbers on it (Ah ha! There's that emergent math!). They learned through trial and error that the money needed to fit the cash register drawers so they began cutting it down. All the while they were shopping and checking people out, taking their food "home" to the library and the loft. Social skills were tested through negotiating who would be checkers and who would shop. I suggested creating a crew of "Night Stockers" but that was voted down by my colleagues. The children never see the night stockers. They aren't a part of their shopping experience.

Which brings us to the phone booth...

When I was little, every grocery store had some form of public phone either inside or out. In Australia, Sue says there are still red, British-style phone booths. Phone booths are a part of our childhood memories, not of our students'. But we described them, each in turn, to the children, emphasizing that, once upon a time, people didn't carry phones in their pockets! There were public phones and people actually stood in line to use them. The children were entranced.

So Carrie and Sue made one out of cardboard, plastic, paint and duct tape. And the children began lining up to use it. It was and is a delight for all of us.

So here it is, a documentation of a series of projects and activities that emerged through the day to day life of a multi-age classroom of three and four year olds. I didn't even mention the books we read as part of our work with the children, but there were many. There was probably more we could have done. But having done this much has been a joy for everyone. And the emergence of curriculum will doubtless continue.

Our Space Shuttle

Space Shuttle

Cardboard and duct tape go far in our classroom. After some study of space and a visit to the Air and Space Museum, two talented teachers built a space shuttle for the dramatic play area. As I've written before, dramatic play is where children practice their new knowledge and connect it to what they already know. Using dramatic play for learning language, social skills, math, and every other area of development is the sine qua non of early childhood education. I teach about it in my course, Art, Music and Movement for Young Children.


In our center found objects are more valuable than commercial ones, so the control panels, the heat tiles, and whatever mechanical innards we need are made with old tubing, tape, bottle caps, clips, straws, cork, and anything else we can find. Commercial products do not teach little ones about process. Something already made reinforces the idea that everything you need you can buy online, and you aren't a part of a creative process. Children learn through the process of exploration and invention. As my friend, Rae Pica, wrote in her recent Huffington Post blog, learning about child development should be required for all early childhood (and late childhood!) educators. Children cannot learn through their senses, intellect, and emotions if they are treated as if they are older than they are.

In our space shuttle some of the control panels were created by the children, and some by ingenious adults using a colorful assortment of junk.
Children made art for mission control (the loft) and used developmental spelling to reflect on the theme. They worked under the loft with tools to "fix" any problems the shuttle had, and did "space walks" with tethers, wearing home-made oxygen tanks. Having read stories about space walks  the children understood the use of these devices.

Rae's blog suggests that there are still people out there who doubt the effectiveness of this type of project approach even though it has been the cutting edge of education for all ages for some time. If any of these folk spent some time talking to our children about space and rockets they would soon find out that children do learn through the power of projects that recognize the process of learning, and of development. Conversations with children who have experienced this type of learning should be required before parents send their children to school for the first time.

Adult-created panel

Answers to a question

Oxygen supply

Child-created panel