Search results matching tags 'preschool' and 'urban school'

meaningful differences

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:40:29 GMT

Wow, yesterday’s post certainly touched a nerve. That was the most hits I ever got on my blog, and the most comments. So thank you, everyone, for being part of the conversation.

So the question is, how do preschool teachers strike a balance between helping their disadvantaged students get a great education and a leg up, and remaining true to early childhood principles without pushing an inappropriate curriculum on them? At least, I think that is the question. It’s a little hard to put into one brief sentence. Or maybe that’s the glass of wine I had with dinner…

The whole thing brings me back to my favorite book on education, Meaningful Differences, by Hart and Risley. I’ve written about it before, here (referring to an article about the book), here (talking to my 1 year old niece and nephew), and here (talking with my nephew at age 2). Here’s what the publisher has to say:

Their painstaking study began by recording each month — for 2-1/2 years — one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. Rare is a database of this quality. “Remarkable,” says Assistant Secretary of Education Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, of the findings: By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families. Between professional and welfare parents, there was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating this verbal interaction to a year, a child in a professional family would hear 11 million words while a child in a welfare family would hear just 3 million.

Did you get that one amazing sentence, about how the vocabularies of the three year olds in the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families? When the kids then get to kindergarten, the poor kids have vocabularies of about 2,000 words. Pretty good, huh? Well, not when you compare that to the vocabularies of the professionals’ kids — they go to kindergarten with 20,000 words at their disposal.

That makes me sick to my stomach. Then it makes my blood boil. And after that, I roll up my sleeves and determine that MY students will have as many rich experiences and conversations as possible. I do all I can to talk to them and listen to them and teach them about conversations, questions, answers, and discussion. The inequality they face as a result of their families’ economic circumstances just gives me more reason to do everything I can to get them ready for kindergarten on an even ground with the more advantaged kids they will meet there.

So please keep in mind that I do not teach in the suburbs. I don’t teach rich kids. My view of preschool is shaped by my experiences in my urban district. If I were to teach the kids of college-educated parents, I might have a different view entirely.

Although, knowing how opinionated and stubborn I am, maybe not!

the play

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 01:01:36 GMT

In the last week of school, we went on a wonderful field trip. The mother of a former student contacted me a few months ago to ask if I’d be interested in bringing my class to the children’s theater where she works. They were doing outreach for urban preschoolers, and were offering free tickets and a free bus. Of course I said yes!

The day before the trip, an outreach person from the theater came to visit to do storytelling with my class. She was wonderful, and immediately had a great rapport with them. Miss Slinger and I sat in the back and watched, along with M., my teenage volunteer (more on him in another post). The visitor had them reach into a grocery bag and pull out objects, and then she told us the stories she associates with those objects (the ladle had her reminiscing about making and eating soup in the winter with her young daughters, and so on).

Then they made a story together, with our visitor drawing the setting (a house) and the characters that the children called out: a chicken! a bird! a dog! a cat! a bear! a squirrel! And all the characters, the class insisted, were sitting on the roof. Last character was a cow, who was down by the door. “Why is the cow by the door? What is he doing?”

“He’s saying, let me in!” they chorused.

“Okay, so the cow says, ‘Let me in,’ but nobody answered. Why didn’t anyone answer?”

“Because they were all on the roof!!!”

“So the cow said, ‘I want to come up to the roof, too!’ But how will he get up there?”

“A bird will fly him!”

“Wow. A bird. Okay, a giant eagle swooped down and flew him up to the roof!” She drew another cow, on the roof. “Oops. It looks like the cow is sitting on the bird. Sorry bird.” Then she did the bird’s voice — “Hey, get off of me!” and went into this whole hilarious riff about the bird feeling squished by the cow. The children were in the palm of her hand, rapt with attention and with glee. Then she split the class in half — one half audience, one half acting out the story — and acted out the story twice. The part about the cow sitting on the bird kept getting funnier, and I had tears in my eyes watching them. They made me so happy, and I knew I would be saying goodbye within days.

The next day we had the thrilling bus ride to the theater, and walked in to find magical chains of leaves hanging from the ceiling all around us. We had to walk through the leaves to get to our seats, so the effect was magical right from the start. The play was wonderful and silly, and I only had to get Raspberry and Pumpkin to sit back down and get off the set three times.

It was a happy, happy morning.

Lockdown drill

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:17:59 GMT

We had a “Code Red” practice the other day. The Prince let me know about it in advance, so I was able to prepare the children.

“Remember when we had a fire drill?”

“Yeah! That was loud!”

“Was there really a fire in our school?”

“No!”

“Right, we were just practicing in case there ever is a fire in our school. And you know what? The whole time I was in school, there was never ever a fire in my school. So I don’t think it’s going to happen here, either. Anyway, we are going to have a different kind of drill. It’s called a lockdown drill. We’re going to practice what to do if a bad guy ever comes into our school. We’re going to lock the door, turn off the lights, shut the shades, and be really, really quiet. We’ll be hiding. And eating goldfish.”

Every year when we do this I forget how I did it in the past, so as not to scare my class. This is what I did this year. “Okay, now let’s be really quiet.” I was whispering at this point. Miss Slinger was passing out the little cups of goldfish — if you want to keep preschoolers quiet, put some food in their mouths! “If there was a big pink dragon in our school, could it find us?” The class chorus-whispered “No!” I said, “Right, because we are hiding. It couldn’t find us.”

Then the children started raising their hands, to whisper questions like, “What if a giant stag beetle was in our school, could it find us?” And the response was always, “No, because we are hiding. It couldn’t find us.” They also wondered what if a giant caterpillar was in our school, a giant beetle, a giant bunny….

And nobody found us!

Welcome back

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:29:40 GMT

Today was for me — and for many, many other teachers — the first day back after winter break. Other than feeling the pain of jet lag when the alarm went off early this morning, the day went really well.

Cherry and Chutney — alone of the whole class — threw their arms around me when they got to school. Everyone else was more subdued, with shy grins on their faces. When I picked them up from gym, they had formed an ABC line all by themselves in about five seconds, and were waiting quietly for me to come take them back to class. Their good behavior lasted all morning.

At morning meeting, they wanted to know why there was a picture of a guy on the calendar (on January 18), so I explained about Martin Luther King, Jr., and we ended up looking at a poster about him, which led to discussions about racism, unfairness, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery bus boycott, voting rights, and his murder. They were fascinated, and I told them we’d probably talk about Dr. King each day, because the day honoring him will be coming in two weeks.

Then we talked about our new theme, Under the Sea. I showed them maps of the United States, Africa, and Asia, so we could talk about where we live now, where our ancestors (or in the case of my Vietnamese student, her parents) came from, and how the land masses are surrounded by water, which we call oceans or seas. Then we looked at a poster about fish, and discussed the characteristics of fish, and how they are the same or different from people (for example, fish have bones, and so do we — the whole class started prodding their bodies and shouting out the locations of their bones — “my knee!” “my fingers!” “my eye!” “no, not your eye, honey, but you do have an eye socket in your skull around your eye…..”).

Then I introduced the math theme, which involves the numbers 1-5. We learned our new math song, which involves the numbers to three, and I was very impressed that this class can march, hop, jump, or clap exactly three times and then stop. Most previous classes have just jumped and jumped and not connected it to counting at all.

One girl showed me a nasty scratch on her upper arm in the middle of morning meeting. Later, I asked her if she could tell me how she got it, and she wouldn’t. I told her that she could tell me any time, and I would try to make her feel better. Her only response was to throw her arms around me and give me a really long hug. She sees a counselor once a week, so when the counselor comes to get her on Wednesday morning, I will tell her about the scratch. It might be nothing, but maybe someone gave it to her….

Access to pre-K for Spanish-speaking children

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:33:20 GMT

Here’s an interesting article about the barriers to getting Latino children into preschool.

I work at a school with a significant Latino population, but in the beginning, when my program was added, I attracted mostly native-English speakers. Slowly, parents at the school with younger children learned about my classroom, and each year I have more and more children whose first language is Spanish. (Why oh why did I study French in high school?!)

I’m always proud to send them on to kindergarten, knowing that they will do very well, and that they are much better prepared than their peers.

Ana Solano, who immigrated from Mexico five years ago, was unaware of the importance of early childhood education until the home-based visits began for her 4-year-old daughter, Ana. She said she immediately noticed a remarkable difference between Ana and her older son, Juan Carlos, who had struggled in kindergarten. “I just thought he would pick everything up in school. With Ana, I see how much it helps and how much better off she will be,” she said.

I hope that with a new administration in office, early childhood will get increased funding and attention, and ALL kids who need it, will get access to high quality preschool programs.

Why I teach preschool (instead of kindergarten)

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:30:16 GMT

Splatypus’s comment about my last post got me thinking about the days when I taught kindergarten in one high-poverty school after another.

Kindergarten can be high-stress for a teacher. And not just because her students are living in poverty and have all the problems that go with poverty. Kindergarten can be high-stress because districts are now putting a lot of pressure on the teachers to close the achievement gap and produce results.

Your kids should be doing these things at the start of the year, and if they’re not, you better catch them up. Then in January you better show these test results, and by the end of the year, they better know how to do every single one of things things on this long list here.

When I taught kindergarten, my children showed up years behind, and I had to try to get them through all the educational and social experiences that they missed in the first five years of their lives, plus get them through kindergarten to be ready for first grade. In many instances, it wasn’t possible. I would be trying to teach the kids to read and they would go to the bathroom and not come back. I’d go see what they were doing, and find them at the sink, lost in rapture, playing with water and bubbles. When they were toddlers, they never got to play with water and bubbles, and here they were, making up for lost time.

I tried really hard to teach preschool and kindergarten simultaneously, but that was hard. I tried to be their teacher, their mother, their father, their social worker, their therapist, and their disciplinarian, but that was hard, too.

I went home every day feeling like a failure.

Now I teach prekindergarten, and while I work with a similar demographic, it’s a different experience entirely. My kids come to me missing all sorts of things they should have gotten in the first four years of their lives, sure, but for some reason, getting them one year earlier makes a world of difference.

I can get them through preschool, and I can get them ready for kindergarten. In fact, I can send them off to kindergarten even a little bit ahead of the game.

I go home every night feeling like a success.

So that’s why I’m a preschool teacher.

(image from superdairyboy.com via Google images)

Who needs preschool?

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:14:38 GMT

Does your child need to go to preschool before kindergarten? Does every child need to go? What do kids need to learn before kindergarten, anyway? I think preschool is great, but it isn’t necessary for everyone. If you are raising your child at home, and you’re reading to her, talking to her, playing with her, taking [...]