Reading/telling stories

Gail on the floor :)

I read stories from either a chair or on the floor, but I especially love being on the floor with the children. In this instance, I prep them by singing, "It'll be coming around the circle as it comes", to the tune of, "She'll be coming around the mountain". This helps cut down on the cries of, "I can't see it", when I am showing the book to one part of the circle. I think that sharing a book this way encourages patience and a sense of community--why not enjoy your classmates faces enjoying the story before or after you have? 

Even though it is totally OKAY to read a story to children word for word (how many books can one memorize, after all?), it is so much better to really know your story ahead of time. After you have read a book many times you begin to know it so well that you know the structure of the story (is it a repeating, or expanding pattern story? Does it have places where children can be asked, "What do you think s/he will do?" or "How do you think s/he feels?". Is there a refrain you can include the children in so that they are part of the telling? (believe me, the more they are able to participate, the better they pay attention!). After a time with the same group of children over the course of a year, I've found that some of them will guess what kinds of questions you will ask, or what the pattern of the story is.

Using props is also a very effective way of involving children in a story. Felt board stories still excite young children. If you drop a piece, they will laugh and you can be in on the joke. Mistakes by a teacher create community, too. Sharing a story in this manner is an age-old technique. Making puppets for the story is also effective. The advantages of using props is that, not only can you "hook" the visual learner with moving parts, but then you may also place the props in a literacy center for use by children. They enjoy retelling the story with them. You encourage memory and understanding by involving the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modalities of learning. If you are all thumbs with felt, and don't have money for those expensive sets, you can use Google Images to find pictures to laminate and back with a magnet. Magnet board stories are just as effective.

I took a course at The Kennedy Center called Tiny Toy Tales, taught by the wonderful Sean Layne. We made boxes to house the props for a story, including little toy characters. They were based on story books, but we were provided with a script for retelling the stories that gave the children something to do to participate in the telling. The scripts were layered with the learning of concepts that are required in learning standards. But the children wouldn't suspect they were being "taught" these concepts. They just enjoyed the telling (and retelling). The box can then be put in the literacy center. One of my tiny toy tales (Trashy Town) was in our literacy center this week.

Story sharing from picture books needn't be a case of the teacher sitting on a chair while obedient (!) little tykes watch and listen. Children come in all different flavors...er...learning styles. We are told to differentiate instruction. We can do this with story-telling or reading, too. I have shared some of my thoughts about this. Please share yours, also. 

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.

Becoming a Life-Long Learner

I will start backwards, since backwards design is the rage...
This is the Welcome Symbol of our stairwell ocean. He/she is an octopus made by children, stuffing shredded paper into stockings and gluing buttons on the tentacles to represent suckers (Wiki Answers says they are called that. I'm not making it up!). I suggested that, as younger children are starting in a week, we may have to give the octopus a smiley face, to make sure they aren't put off preschool permanently.

Seriously, though, the ocean in the stairwell is painstakingly designed and executed by creative teachers and eager children. The children take full ownership, calling it "Our Ocean". I shiver with delight when I hear this.

Since I do teach integrating the arts with curriculum, and emphasize project learning, this is a terrific example for me to document. What is at the top of the ocean? At the bottom? In the middle? What are these zones called? The stairwell answers and illustrates them answers. Our incredibly creative teacher, Carrie, made the adult signs for explaining to parents what we all have been teaching. There are various zones of depth that have differing amounts of light, and the sea life of each zone is adapted to that light. I do not intend to explain that here, but would rather show pictures and comment on the cross-curricular opportunities afforded by teaching this way. To have children just barely four and children turning five and a half participate in a project where each child has a creative role and can explain their own understanding of the learning appropriate to their developmental level is what we call "best practice" in the business. I call it amazing.

Our children used reference materials to illustrate their understandings. Sometimes they strove for accuracy and sometimes for whimsy. Being young children they usually combined the two to some degree.

Invented or developmental spelling is a literacy element in the project. Children sounded out the zone beside the adult explanations of each zone.

The most colorful and elaborate part of this exhibit is the coral at the top of the stairs. Children painted the coral and cut out sections. They helped tape the pieces up with teacher guidance. Fish and other sea life were added to show how they lived among the coral, which itself is alive.

The deep water has unusual sea life, not often shown in children's storybooks so it is helpful to portray it.

Jellyfish, made with coffee filters and either yarn or paper curls, were very popular with the children. They enjoyed both making and helping to hang them.

At the bottom of two flights of stairs lay the "trenches" where the life that can live with little light resides. Here we have an example of that life, an explanation, and a child's attempt to write the name of the zone. Accuracy isn't the point. The attempt to express meaning through letters and pictures is a hallmark of early and developmentally appropriate literacy practice.

I could go on, but I hope I've made my points. As I wrote in my first post about this project, children in the fifth grade are learning this material. And they are doing most excellent reading and writing, listening and discussing, I'm sure. When our children arrive at the fifth grade, they will have had this grounding experience of having been immersed in the life of the sea, a virtual world in the stairwell of their school. During the years between now and then we hope they will retain their keen love of participating in their own planning of projects, and that they will own their own learning. This is what we as educators want for our children. This is what makes a "life-long learner".

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

Can the Arts Save Education?

Can the Arts Save Education?

Yes!
Okay, I'm done.
No, seriously, the arts are the new go-to solution for failing schools.

We have tried extrinsic rewards, or "positive reinforcement" through certificates, stars, stickers, contests, jellybean jars, and praise ("good job!"). We have tried testing out the wazoo, tying test scores to teacher pay (a miserable form of behavior modification that fails our children so why try it with teachers?). We have tried speeches and grand-standing. We've tried firing teachers. Has any of this improved test scores or even stopped the downward slide in many schools?

No!

The definition of insanity is doing the same sort of thing over and over again, expecting that the next time it will work. How we have been trying to improve education is, by that definition, insane.

The arts are instrinsically motivating. The arts instill not only discipline but a desire to pursue discipline because that discipline helps the individual to improve at what they most love doing. Pursuing an artistic endeavor nurtures self-esteem and integrates the mind, body and emotions. Teaching through the arts motivates children to go more deeply into a subject because they are more committed to the process of learning. Finally, states are getting serious about giving the arts their due. "There's lots of evidence that kids immersed in the arts do better on their academic tests".  In many schools children are being taught through project work that includes some art form, be it music, movement, drama or dance. You won't find this in the school just around the corner, necessarily, but it is happening out there.

I have written extensively about project work and arts integration in early childhood, specifically in preschool. During the Bush years my graduate professors often spoke wistfully about how preschool education was ahead of elementary education. High-stakes testing and the emphasis on teaching reading and math to elementary school children through "scientific" methods have failed to live up to their promise.

Teaching and learning through the arts gives children the juice, the food they need to want to learn. It is satisfying and intrinsically rewarding to create, using new knowledge and information, with the guidance of a teacher who understands integrating curriculum and artistic work. Children are hungry for this. Let's feed them.

Creating in Three Dimensions

Three dimensional construction is a mainstay of the preschool curriculum. In my school we have a center for these small wooden blocks, a large muscle rug for the huge wooden blocks we call "hollow blocks", and we also stock plastic milk crates in two outdoor closets on our playground. Construction is very popular among both boys and girls. And since there has been an ongoing major construction project across the street, construction has become even more meaningful. The children see the steps of real building going on in their neighborhood.

In this photo the children have constructed a zoo. We haven't gone to the zoo (to be arranged) but when we brought out the plastic animals the children saw their opportunity and took it! Their passion is intense. They cooperate in ways that are amazing for three and four year old children. They don't stop and ask why we have blocks. The reasons to them are self-evident.

Why do we use blocks in preschool? Do children play with blocks in first, second or third grade? Why aren't we sitting them down and making them do workbooks? Why aren't we asking them to make Winter pictures of snowmen since so many children's books equate snow with Winter, regardless of the fact that many regions of the world have no snow at all? Why aren't we drilling them on letters and numbers, rewarding them with stickers for correct answers?

Because we know that what the children are passionate about are also interests that lead to a broader and richer development of their talents and abilities. What children learn through block play is how to manipulate three-dimensional objects in space. They learn to visualize what they want to accomplish before they even take out a single block. The more practice they have, the more accurate their visualizations become. Over time their creations become more complex and intricate, not to mention surprisingly skilled. They are practicing Spatial intelligence. Schools beyond preschool have traditionally neglected it (see the above link). These skills are devalued by traditional schools when they could become an integral part of a child's future. This is a vacuum in education that needs to be filled.

Kindergarten, first and second grade are still considered early childhood by all experts in the field. Yet recess drops to almost zero, children are asked to sit still way too much for their growing bodies and intelligences, and they are asked to do work and take tests that have no relevance to their actual futures. Learning is dynamic. Children are active learners who have all of Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences in their growing brains and bodies. Let's continue to exploit these intelligences into the early elementary school years. They will learn to read and write and compute, but they will do so in an organic way that includes engagement and interest in truly creative work 

The Snowy Day: Teaching Art, Teaching Tolerance

 

I am breathless with excitement! The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats, is fifty years old, and a commemorative edition is out. I’ve already ordered it after reading about it in the Washington Post Style section today.

I was ten when book came out and felt that I was way too mature to look at a mere picture book, but I did happily read it to my daughters when they were little. Since we were living in the D.C. area and only visited my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio a few times in winter, the magic of snow in the city was mostly unfamiliar to them. Those few times that we did visit home, they made snow angels to their hearts’ content, as did the story’s protagonist Peter in The Snowy Day. We never talked about Peter as black. He was a little boy, just like some of the little boys they knew in school.

When I began teaching young children, Keat’s stories became a regular part of my curriculum. We went outside in the snow (with boots on!) to make snow angels and throw snowballs at trees (not at people!). The children enjoyed making tracks in the snow with sticks, as Peter did. They experimented with footprints, and we looked for animal tracks. I even photographed snow-tracks of different animals for guessing games. After reading Peter’s Chair, the children voted on a design of a chair we would sand and paint for the school’s auction. One little boy asked his mother to bring his baby sister to school for show-and-tell. Peter had a baby sister, so he wanted to share his!

Once I began teaching Language Arts for Young Children at Northern Virginia Community College I required my students to do an author report, sharing curriculum ideas, biographical, and bibliographical information. Much to my surprise, and a testament to the truism that teachers learn by teaching, I discovered that “Jack” was not black. He was a Jew of Eastern European descent, and that he changed his name to Keats from Katz because of the anti-Semitism he experienced in New York. My own mother experienced such anti-Semitism in urban Cleveland during those same years. A simple story about a little boy became intensely personal for me.

Keats expressed his love for his tumbledown urban, integrated (“diverse”) neighborhood through his art.  Keats’ love of art, of his life in a city of graft and graffiti, inspired his storytelling even as both he and his subjects suffered from prejudice and bigotry.

Teachers can take Keats’ work as a springboard for many activities that inspire interest in science, art, literature and math. They do this all the time. African-American teachers can and do use The Snowy Day for Black History month, since Peter was the first black child featured in an American picture book. What else can we do?

A large part of teaching young children includes emotional literacy: Knowing and understanding your own feelings in order to understand other people. Can we talk about how Keats felt a kinship with his black protagonist because of his own experience in a less than tolerant country? Can we talk about feeling left out or disliked with young children by asking them to journal about their own experiences? Can we talk about understanding others? Even as my mother and her family suppressed her roots to get by in twentieth century urban American, (the family name, Mansfeld, was changed to Mansfield), Keats changed his name to hide his own roots. We don’t want children to feel they have to do the same thing with any aspect of their identities. We want them to become fearless in art and fearless in communication, bridging divides while expressing themselves authentically, just as he did. How do you do this in your teaching practice? Share your thoughts.

How do you motivate teachers to be creative?

As anyone who reads my blog knows, I love to write with a picture in mind, even if the subject doesn't necessarily connect to the topic, I will make it connect. So if you read this, you can give me a thumbs-up or -down on how well I connect this picture to what I'm about to write!

In this photo, I am four and my brother is two. We were brought into a photographic studio of a tall blonde woman who had a large studio with big, rectangular shaped lights. I wasn't thrilled about having my picture taken with my dopey (sorry, Bob) little brother to begin with, and then we were asked to sit together on a table all cozy while the photographer struggled with her equipment. When she was finally ready to take our picture I had already had enough of her fussing, ignoring moi, and giving us curt commands. I did not want to smile and I definitely didn't want to look directly into the big rectangular light that  hurt my eyes. I fidgeted, and kept looking away. My mother, somewhere to my right, pleaded with me to cooperate. You can see from the picture that I did. but I was not happy about it!

What, does this have to do with motivating teachers to be creative, you may well ask, and with good reason! I will attempt to explain.

In the first place one has to consider that there are preschools where teachers and management have little interest in creativity in the first place. I am  not going to go there. They have their own reward, as they say in church. I am talking about how schools that have NAEYC accreditation, and have, in their literature, explanations of how their curriculum is creative, stimulating and developmentally appropriate. How does management--"heads of school", directors, and other administrators--motivate its teaching staff to go beyond creating the everyday, ordinary curricular learning experiences that usually satisfy the majority of parents who know little of what can really be done in the service of learning in its broadest sense?

One model I know of does it this way: Teachers are told to create exciting learning activities aligned with the school's yearly curricular goals and its literacy curriculum. Coming into the situation, a new faculty member believes that she can, within the parameters of the school's curriculum, create learning experiences that are as creative and interesting to children as possible, drawing from the world's cultures, traditions and arts to do so. But this teacher soon gets a surprise! Just as my four-year-old self came into a room of cold light, and admonishments to be still and smile, this teacher is asked to put aside her ideas and try to emulate other teachers, the reasoning being that if one teacher does something different, parents will demand the same from other teachers. Go ahead and be creative, but don't "show up your colleagues".

Imagine if the four-year-old, instead of being asked to sit still and stare while the photographer was getting ready, was given permission to explore the studio with parental guidance, and then asked how she would like to pose? I know, it isn't an analogy that quite fits (thumbs-down?), but there is some parallel here. Bear with me.

A second program expresses that it wants teachers to be creative, to bring their own strengths to the job of teaching young children. If teachers do projects that are different from those of other teachers, administrators encourage it, and when parents ask for the same in other classrooms, the pressure is on those teachers to be more creative, to make more connections, to go beyond the boundaries of the average aggregate of activities that are ordinarily used. That the administration has the back of the creative teacher ensures instruction and planning will evolve into new learning and new experiences.

Which way do you like? In which program would you want to teach?

Yoga for Kids: Discipline and play

How enthusiastically my students have always taken up Yoga! I started bringing the original YogaKids video to school quite a few years ago to find that the children actively engaged themselves in mirroring the poses of the young children they saw in the video. Amidst the usual silliness of fours there was a focus centered on doing the poses that I hadn't seen before. My co-teacher and I would walk around and gently correct the children who were willing, giving kind words of encouragement. Soon I had a large book of Yoga poses in the reading corner, and children could be seen laying it on the floor and trying pose after pose, talking to each other about how they were supposed to be done.

The day after our first session parents came in asking for the information on how to obtain YogaKids. The children had enthused about it at home and their excitement was infectious! Soon, parents and children were doing the video together.

Since then the Yoga for Kids movement has grown enormously! There are many resources out there for teachers and parents. I want to offer some of them here. Movement integrates the brain and energizes clear thinking. It enables children to use all of their resources for life in the "fast" lane. It also gives them a sense of what it means to be centered and focused. I myself have done Yoga for years and last year, after a year of practice, was finally able to do a headstand unaided. The accomplishment made me hungry for more Yoga and the self-confidence it generates. Imagine what it will do for your children and students!

http://www.livestrong.com/article/226156-yoga-games-for-kids/ This is a blog entry about Yoga for kids, as well as other physical activities.
http://www.amazon.com/Yoga-Pretzels-Cards-Tara-Guber/dp/1905236042/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1308834312&sr=8-3  This is the Amazon link to Yoga Pretzels, a deck of Yoga pose cards for kids and grown-ups that was lovingly photocopied and laminated for me by a teacher friend. :)
http://www.yogajournal.com/lifestyle/210  Here is a lovely reflection on Yoga with your own children by a mom who knows.
http://www.iyogalife.com/yogaforkids/index.php  A Yoga blog by a Yoga teacher for children!

Music and Movement: Inextricably Intertwined

How amazing it is to put music on during centers, put out a tote full of scarves, and watch children swarm the bag for the colorful banners of movement they would like to wield! If you are lucky and very sneaky you will be able to catch one of them in the act of finding their center and expressing the feelings evoked by the music, as I did in the photo. I have taught college students from several excellent texts that each emphasize a different aspect of what we call "Music and Movement", but these two concepts have no separate meanings to young children. They are inextricably intertwined. In Rae Pica's book, Experiences in Movement, she demonstrates the connection between music skills and movement skills. If the music is pizzacato--plucked strings suggesting light, quick movement, like in Benjamin Britten's Simple Symphony, Playful Pizzacato Movement--children can use movement skills like hopping or jumping. The creative movement becomes perfect for integrating science curriculum concepts about grasshoppers or fireflies blinking on and off! If the music is legato, or smooth and connected--like in Mozart's Rondo in A minor, K 511--children can use movement skills like sliding and swaying. These movements show the smooth movements of fish in water, or birds in the sky. 

Once I played this last lovely piece for my fours so they could move smoothly and freely. One little boy sighed and said, "I love this song...". How glorious to bring together the beauty and power of great music for young bodies to give expression to their innermost feelings through movement.