Kindergarten Today

Hey, this is easy!

My class is learning to read.

It is a slow process- one we have been working on since August.

These are letters. Letters have sounds. Sounds blend together to make words.

Words can be put together to form a sentence. Sentences provide us with information.

We write sentences to tell a story. We can read our story to others. Whew!

 

One of my students brought his reader to my desk yesterday. The series we are using right now has a combination of “high frequency” words like the, see, in, me, you, etc. combined with some simple CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words like can, dad, ran, etc, and a few vocabulary words like clock, drive, squirrel, which are illustrated with a little icon directly above the word. They are not stories, but simply pages with a sentence and an illustration that match. So my student read three pages- “I see the clock.” “The dad can drive.” “The squirrel ran.”  

Then he looked at me, grinned, and said, “Hey, this is easy!”

Music to my ears!!! 

Back to School!

I'm sure we will have an exciting day and I will report back soon...

Times have changed...a little.

The Caddo Herald

December 14, 1934

Bryan County Rural Teachers Receive Pay Increase

Bryan county teachers in rural schools will received an average salary of $823 for the 1934-35 term, which is an increase of 32 percent over last year, but $44 less than the average in 1929-30, according to a survey just released by Dr. J. M. Ashton, research director of the state chamber of commerce.

Dr. Ashton found that the 4,909 rural teachers in the state reported to date are receiving an average yearly wage of $685 compared with $914 paid for the year 1929-30.

In Bryan County, for purposes of comparison, men teachers in 1934-35 will receive an average salary of $987 per year, while women will receive $752. In 1929-30 men received $1,097 and women $770.

However, despite the increase this year, prices have gone up from the depression low to, until the total teacher salaries paid in the state will buy eight per cent less than in 1929-30.

Ford C. Harper, manager of the state chamber of commerce says, “These figures show a gratifying improvement over last year. However, the next problem is to see that administrative economics and fiscal changes are made so that even these low salaries can be paid in cash without discount.” 

An Ordinary Day

Yesterday I gave my students the gift of an ordinary day. We did not discuss security, although I’m sure they noted that our campus officer was in the front hall greeting students. We did not discuss the recent tragedy, although I was prepared to do so if anyone mentioned it.  I did not give them extra praise or hugs, although I said an extra prayer of thanks for their safety.  We did not do anything differently. Sometimes that is what children need most- a day so ordinary and predictable that it makes them feel safe.

Behavior...again.

I can follow directions.

I can work independently, stay on task, and complete my work.

I can organize myself and my supplies

I can participate appropriately in group activities.

I can respect adults and peers.

I take care of my supplies and school property.

I am willing to practice in order to learn new skills.

I can listen attentively without interrupting.

I can make appropriate transitions between activities.

 

Reort Cards

It comes down to this again: knowledge vs. behavior, skills vs. product, words vs. performance.

“I promise I will be good.”

“Yes, I can follow the rules.”

“I know how to do it quietly, it just forgot.”

I have been talking to my students these past few weeks about showing me their best work and behavior. Many of them can recite the rules and procedures of our classroom flawlessly. They just choose not to employ them except in tattling on others. So I have been emphasizing the difference between talking, talking, talking about the rules and just showing me that they can follow them. I have three students who have reached this halfway point in the year and still can’t walk from the cafeteria to our classroom without flapping their arms, poking a classmate, talking, hopping, laughing loudly, and just generally being a nuisance. Our path leads us through a hall past the office and other classrooms and they have absolutely no awareness of or respect for the occupants of either.

I also have students with unreadable handwriting and sloppy, sloppy daily work- not for lack of skills, but for lack of effort.  I know they have the skills because when I ask them to redo their work or stand at my desk and do something it is suddenly transformed into acceptable kindergarten work. I have told my entire class that I don’t want to see scribbling- “I could teach my cat to scribble.”  They are baffled by that statement the first time, but most have seen videos of monkeys, elephants, and even dogs painting, so once I conjure up images of my cat with a crayon tied to his paw they “get it”. Most strive to prove they can outperform a cat! Others don’t care about competing with anyone. They just want to make a few marks on the paper and be done for the day. They haven’t even put any effort into our glittery Christmas projects this week!

It is difficult to convince some parents that attitude and work habits are so important at this age. They hold tight to the belief that their child will change as he/she matures. Yes, they will. But it has been my experience with hundreds of kindergarten students that the foundation for becoming a good student lies in basic personality traits. And personality traits can only be changed through the efforts of the person who possesses them.  You can’t talk, teach, bribe, beg, cajole or love a person into being different.  You can only try to find out what they want- recognition, reward, privilege - and try to connect it to what you want them to do. Maturity brings self-awareness that causes some students to change their ways in order to receive what they desire. However, if lazy work habits are already established it can be a battle to change them. And many children are labeled by their peers as the class clown, smart one, good reader, troublemaker, etc. at a very early age. It can be a struggle to get rid of those perceptions!

 Some parents are concerned with the legitimate struggles of their children because of physical or academic disabilities. But once again, it is often their personality, attitude, motivation, effort, etc. that makes all the difference in their success as a student! Some children just give up and stay with what they have always done. Others strive to move forward no matter what.

It is a challenge to work each day with students who posses such a wide range of skills and personalities. That’s why I love teaching! But I must confess that it is always more rewarding to teach a child with low skills who says “I will try!” than a genius who says “I don’t want to!”

 

Report Card Testing

This week and next we are slowly but surely finishing our report card testing. There is never a perfect time to test kindergarten children but it seems particularly inappropriate during the pre-holiday break weeks when everyone is just a wee bit hyper. We do the best we can!

I don’t attempt to sit down with each child and test them for all of their required skills. They would quickly get bored and distracted, especially since I have to test them in the classroom while their peers are doing other things. Instead I test one skill each day. Last week I tested five language skills. This week we have been testing math skills, so yesterday each child came to my desk and counted from 1-50 for me. Today each one will show me that they recognize the numbers 1-20 in random order. Some skills can also be tested on paper as a group activity. I put all the test results on a checklist and later I transfer the scores to individual files and report cards.

I spend a lot of time observing my students and listening to them. I also look at their daily work. But nothing is more revealing than the time-honored standard of show-me-what-you-know testing. None of us like it. We probably do too much of it. But it is a fact of life….little Johnny isn’t going to walk up to my desk and say, “Hey, you know I really can’t say my days of the week.” So I’m left to figure it out for myself. 

Busy Bodies, Busier Minds

I’ve written before about the difficulty of getting 15-25 students to pay attention to and follow instructions about any task, from writing a sentence to putting a puppet together. I can’t stand next to each desk and explain the directions multiple times, so students must learn to focus on my words, process what I’ve asked them to do, ask questions if they don’t understand, and then stay focused until the task is complete. I try to make their instructions simple and obvious. I gather them on the rug for more complicated project instructions so they are away from the temptations of their desks and other papers. I demonstrate. I leave a sample on the board that they are free to look at or even take to their desk for comparison and confirmation if necessary. I try to think of and circumvent any major mistakes they might make, but somehow, someone still manages to surprise me.

I watch students as they complete group work during reading and writing, but I don’t stand around and observe while they are attending to their independent daily work in math, phonics, and projects.  During that time I work with individual students at my desk on testing, tutoring, and reading. So I often don’t see mistakes made by students until they turn in their papers for my review and correction.

I should backtrack a bit to state that one of the most obvious problems I’ve observed in my multiple years in kindergarten is that my students are little “busy bodies” always trying to monitor and mind the business of their classmates. You would think that by December they would be accustomed to my daily testing and tutoring, but just yesterday one of them was completely turned around in his seat watching me test his best buddy. This need to know what everyone else is doing totally distracts some students from their own work. They also lack the confidence to do what they think is correct if their neighbor is doing a task differently.

Another problem is that many children are easily distracted by any and all changes in the room. Yesterday I hung up a shiny plastic Christmas tree decoration in my room. It’s hanging on a piece of fishing wire from the ceiling. There are five wires hanging on that side of the room and I change the decorations seasonally, so the kids are pretty used to something being there. However, one of my students spent ten minutes looking at it, talking to it, and definitely NOT working.

Also yesterday, when we started our group writing paper about hibernating bears one of my boys started squealing "Piggy, piggy, piggy" and making strange faces. It was quite obvious that he was not listening to me, did not know we were beginning our writing task, and was not mentally in the classroom with us.

 

Earlier in the week I asked my students to write ten "R" words on their papers, using any resource in the room (books, charts, desk tags, etc.) This is an assignment we have done before with other letters, we’ve done in group, and they have done as individuals. There are at least twenty words around the room that begin with any particular letter of the week since we always have a letter poem and weekly letter chart available.  Yet, one of my girls wrote "name, name, name, name..." twenty times, because that was the first thing she saw on her paper! 

 

We have been learning about “word families” (rhyming words) since the first week of school. We have focused primarily on words with the same endings, although during story time we have also examined some words that end with the same sound, but not the same letters. For testing purposes I ask my students to write six rhyming words. Later I ask them individually to tell me six rhyming words. The writing test is given as a group task. And of course for this age level I say one word, write it on the board, say it again, and ask them to write a word that rhymes with it. During this week’s test, one of my students, who sits on the front row with very little peer distraction, totally ignored me, looked at the chart on the opposite wall, and wrote out all ten of our sight words! 

 

In connection with that same skill, last week I gave my students a "word families" paper last with _an, _an, _an, _op, _op, _op, etc. on it- total of four sets of families that we are very, very familiar with and have written on graphic organizers, spelling tests, and numerous other papers. One of my students filled in the blanks with A, B, C, D, E, F, G.....

 

I’ve told you before that teaching kindergarten is challenging. I’ve told you that this is the foundation for the rest of a child’s education. This is the year when children become students by learning to really listen, not just with their ears, but with their minds. And by learning to process what they hear and do what they are told. For some it is just a continuation of their experiences at home. For others it is a totally foreign concept.

 

BTW- Before I get hate mail from teachers who still believe that students can learn all of their CC standards in home center, let me assure you that yes, in addition to paper tasks my students also paint, play with playdough, talk to each other, go to recess, sing, and build with blocks. 

The Best Students

My colleagues and I have been discussing some of the more difficult challenges of teaching kindergarten. As we approach the next report card period it is apparent that many of our students have not been “looking, listening, and learning” as much as we had hoped. There are very few surprises of course. We observe their behavior each and every day. We review their daily work. We know very clearly who has been naughty and who has been nice. We know who is ready to read. But report card testing and the resulting scores somehow make the issue of student progress much more precise…and troubling.

The best students in our classes are those that are motivated to participate and that is something that we can’t always teach, test, or measure.

One of the key factors to success in any endeavor is simply “doing the work”. From sports to piano lessons to learning to read, it is all about practice, practice, practice. Yet some parents don’t seem to understand my warnings about students who sit at their desks and look around, talk, play with their erasers, poke holes in their papers, and draw pictures in the margins. If this behavior is still prominent in December it is likely to be an indicator that the student will not be promoted to first grade. I have been accused of “giving up” on students when I say that, but that is not true.  I have simply observed hundreds of students and found that those who cannot be encouraged, motivated, or even bribed into working NOW will most likely not do so in the near future. Those students have already given up on the work, and themselves. They are not mature enough or competent enough to understand what we are doing and may need more time or much more individual assistance to complete the requirements to move on to the next grade level. That doesn’t always magically occur between January and May. I continue plodding along and trying out my bag of tricks, but the truth is that the root of the problem is a complicated combination of genetics and personality that I have no control over and neither do parents. It is one of the facts of life that is so difficult for parents- even at this young age, children are very set in their patterns of behavior and until they have an “ah-ha” moment of their own and decide to change their ways, we have only limited influence on them.

I was amused, but not surprised by a recent study that shows that babies are not only much more proficient at complex thinking than was previously believed, but they are prejudiced about certain colors, shapes, objects, etc. and capable of being intentionally mean! Why did we ever think that a human being is a “blank slate” just waiting for our contributions to their cognitive skills when they learn to adapt to their physical, social, cultural, and emotional environment in just a matter of months? If you just think about their ability to learn our language you have to know that something is going on in that brain that is astounding. And it is their brain that is at work, not just a transfer of ours!

The next few weeks will be a whirl of holiday activity. But when we return from our winter break we will be once again confronted with the challenge of teaching these children the skills they need to advance to the next level in their educational journey. What we need most is their cooperation. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope you have a great holiday! We'll back in school Monday. 

Question of the Day

There is a chart in my classroom for the "Question of the Day" and my students answer it by putting their names under 3-5 possible answers. One recent question was "How many pets do you have?" 

Today I ask YOU a question. 

Are you for or against kindergarten retention?

If you would like to give a short explanation for your response, I would also welcome that.