Little Princess Annie

Allow me please to bring up an ancient of age debate in the myriad of arenas within most fields of science, Nature vs Nurture. This wonderful princess must be considered a strong argument for the wonders of nature and the dangerous responsibilities of nurture. See, many of the children this first week when asked if they wanted to read a book, ran for their lives to find something fun, something that made them feel alive, something real. Confused as I was I did not give up hope that one of the smallest in our group and therefore more keen to her nature, would become the arrowhead in one of our main goals for the year: that kids would fall in love with books.

Courtship is by no means a process to be rushed, but at times one strikes a lucky cord and things move quickly. With Little Princess Annie this was the case. Upon my suggestion she consented and the week that followed was one of glorious reading moments, mostly all beckoned by the Princess herself. 

THANK GOD IT'S BROKE!!!

Chanchang The Mr. Flag Fixer Man

          Some probably say that us early learning teachers are kind of on the wack-side of the spectrum. I couldn’t agree more. It’s an honor well represented by few. If we are doing our job right, half the time we are standing on our heads pretending to be some sort of Olympic Gold Medal gymnast lost in translation from a day journey to Mars and back, while the other half of the time we are having to continuously readdress and improve strange unheard animal noises such as the Impala. You see the probably with the success of getting kids to answer questions such as, “What sound does the cow make?” via sacrilegiously innumerous amounts of repetition, is that the cattle head always comes back to bite you and in twice the infinity of repetitions, “What sound does the Impala make?” Ad infinitum. Oops.

          But there are other neuroses that occur below the finger pointed at layers. Most of these remain known only to the teacher him/herself and in the best of play areas a handful of faithful shoulders to the wheel. One of these that I’m willing to reveal is that nagging-all consuming internal debate of SHOULD I DO IT or LET A KID DO IT. A seasoned-intuitive mentor knows best that if an adult did it, a learning chance was stolen from the heavenly realms that have decided to create the all so hard to see but ever-occurring moment for natural learning.

This week our focus was on the wonderful gift of broken things. You know, first week of school, in an almost siblingless society, everybody’s still kind of getting used to the whole sociability basic principles of share, pass, wait, don’t smash the oversized Montessori Triangle on your classmate’s nose. What it all comes down to is that, things break. Great! Times to fix something!! Woo-hoo!! It’s time to bust out my ancestry chops, pay credit to my lineage that fixed things before me. Yeah well, not so quickly there buckaroo, not in Caillou School you won’t, not without some neurotic counter-balancing out of the pros and cons of teacher intervention first that is.

And so we opted to let the kids do it! Drawer knobs were glued, the slide’s flag was screwed in and then hoisted, the climbing rope was knotted up again and man the morning flew by and we didn’t even have time to execute the lesson plan I hashed out for a good 45 minutes the night before. Oh well, monumental development took place, Thank God for broken things.

Sit Back and Watch the Show (then jump in on the madness!!)

“Stand aside for a while and leave room for learning, observe carefully what children do, and then, if you have understood well, perhaps teaching will be different from before.”
Loris Malaguzzi

My last 7 years of teaching and learning, and teaching to learn, and learning to teach, have taught me at least one thing I’ve learned to teach at the beginning of a new school year of learning: Don’t plan for a first day of class!

Sensei Malaguzzi knew well what this meant when she asked us all, parents and teachers alike, to “step aside”. So I guess I broke my own rule you could say, I did plan. I planned to step aside and observe. Who are these wonderful creatures coming into my world? What do they like? How do they respond? What makes them jump with glee? How long can they last on a single task? What do they know? What little do I know?

These and many more were the questions I wallowed in, reminiscing for a bit as well, back on my interning days when I used to fret about what I would teach. Ha. Those were much younger days for sure. This week the kids learned much of which only time will choose to disclose. But there were a few things this detective of learning did detect.

DETECTIVE DUTY

         DETECTING LEARNING

(*Please read the following with severe prudence understanding that by no means are these guidelines for all Children or even for my Children for ever here on out. Education is about individuals/authentic and forever changing. But the blueprint we are working with is simple: Sit back and watch the show.)

1. Math Games work great first thing in the morning
2. Music is a nice transition to Math. (Ask why?)
3. Kids love free play in their homeroom.
4. They all listen through and enjoy a 7 minute story entirely told in English, using puppets of course.
5. Everything Craft related they eat up.
   
6. The 2 seconds to destroy a paper boat is well worth the 23 minutes to make it.
7. Laying on their backs, putting their legs up high and doing bicycle motions is an exercise favorite.
8. Most of my ideas for play are discarded and replaced by their own magic. And I'm glad to be around it all week!

Home away from home.

For at least one of us, Cailliou Home has rather quickly become a home away from home. If you may, I will be bold enough to say for a handful more. But what is HOME in the minds and hearts of children like me?

Home is a place you want to get back to. It is not where the entirety of life unfolds but it is a safe place to return to when the wheat has been harvested, the mountains have been climbed and the dragons have been sleighed. When off along the path of the Hero’s Journey, home is deeply missed. When time comes to make the return it is the misty oasis in the distance that causes you to run when you thought you could not run further. By day it is a memory we carry close to heart. By night it is a dream.

Home is a nest with big and small birds with long and short wings always outstretched to hug in times of joy and in times of grief.

Home is a school, the best of all schools for in its classrooms there seems to be no teaching yet infinite learning. Its rules are of the simplest sorts: fly high, love deep, fail but try again, forgive. Far from the nest, these rules are hard to even hear of, let alone do they have the chance to seep into the hallow marrow they were made for.

At the close of our first week of growing together, all the anxiety that has had me sleepless at night and disperse by day has been squeezed out by the swelling gratitude that has finally oozed into these words. Thank you Jinan, thank you Spotlight, for so quickly becoming my home away from home.