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| Picture from my first day |
Here are some snapshots into my classroom written over this past semester:
“You are Reading!”
“Who thinks they can read today, I’m not
sure you can. What do you think?” Sarcasm rolls off lips and hangs over 21
little heads like a pinch in the air. Heads shake and the confident, rare
“yes’s” intersperse the sea of “no’s” as the kindergarteners struggle to
wriggle themselves still.
“I’m
going to show you our first sight word” She leaves the wooden rocker, uncaps
the Expo, and leaves the inky trail of the word “I” on the board.
“What
is this?”
“I,” children say.
“You just read!” she proclaims.
At this moment I notice him. “He’s my
hugger,” she told me on day one.
She knows he does not get many from home. He barely reaches my hips yet tugs
at her heart-strings.
At this moment he’s watching. Eyes light
up. The corners of his mouth turn
ever wider in delight. Her
exclamation lights a spark in his heart. This woman whose everyday consists of
stern discipline, the “move your clip,” also lives by the motto “my goal for
kindergarten is that they like school.”
The juxtaposition of care and control forms her challenging crux. She mouths, “You are reading! You are
reading!” and the hard words fade.
“That was fun”
Six exit the class to work on numbers
zero to ten with an aid. Miss Goetz perches at the front of the room. With the fifteen kindergarteners left,
she begins to lead counts from zero to twenty. After the chorus stops, the fifteen flit to a new patch of
carpet. Miss Goetz drops bundles
of number cards at their feet.
“Boys and girls lay the cards out starting
with 0 and going to 20.” Number
lines begin popping up; straight across, two rows, looped. From the back, Mrs.
Brown* calls names of students with developed number sense lugging the
number board into the hall.
With lines of zero to twenty complete,
Miss Goetz begins number games.
“Who can find the 18?” Cards fly into the air. “16?” More
cards.
In the back by the tables he sits. Or
does everything but sits. “Matthew*, come on up here,” Miss Goetz calls. “Boys and
girls, Matt* is going to clap a number and you are going to hold up that number
card.” She whispers a number in his ear. He smiles and begins to clap. 1…2….3...
Cards up. She directs and they clean up.
“That was fun,” Matt* proclaims. (*names changed to protect confidentiality)
Don’t Stop the Flow
Miss
Goetz sits at her desk and checks in the students as they enter the room
incrementally from different waves of buses. The students move about the room getting unpacked, making
lunch choices and using the bathrooms.
Morning routines complete, they sit at their tables scribbling at
morning work on beginning sounds.
As they begin to finish, one girl comes
up and asks, “Can I get a whiteboard?”
In a split second Miss Goetz makes a
choice, “Sure you can get a whiteboard. Use it to find “a” words,” she says. Eventually more and more students
finish and grab boards. Some sprawl
across the floor with partners searching books for words. Others work to search the room. Time
for morning meeting comes and goes, and Miss Goetz does not stop them. Given twenty extra minutes the students
continue to explore and make their own discoveries.
Eventually a small tiff breaks out and it
is only then that Miss Goetz takes back the reins and calls, “Put your things
away, let’s go on to Morning Meeting.”
