Thursday, August 11, 2011

Finishing Up

As usual, our Summer curriculum is woven from many different threads. With one thread, we worked to incorporate all of the vacation experiences we heard the children reflecting on as they returned to the classroom after spending time on family adventures. We listened to tales of sunshine, sand, ocean waves, lobsters, lakes, boats- all sorts of inspiring images to feed the imagination!

Time for sharks, shells, seaweed, fish, and whales! Soon the Frogs were including all of these ocean-y elements into their pretend play. It was almost as if we were all on an extended ocean vacation together, without having to leave the classroom!

Another curriculum thread involved managing a practical warm weather concern; how do we manage to play outside comfortably in the midst of a fairly impressive heatwave?
Frogs vs. Weather is definitely not a new theme this year; Although our winter was relatively short this year, it still contained a record breaking amount of snow for our region. We managed to get our collective butts outside as often as we could, but when the snow piled up enough to measure neck high on our tallest kiddos, we were forced to play indoors a bit more often than we liked while we waited for everything to thaw out. The memory of all of those snowbound days made it so we just could not bear to stay indoors while the sun was shining, no matter how hot things threatened to get this Summer. Fortunately, Frogs are waterproof...


As long as we headed outdoors before the sun became too intense, and made plenty of water available for pouring, splashing, spraying, and engineering, we barely noticed the heat!

Perhaps the most significant thread this summer had to do with the concept of growth.

The seedlings that we started way back in February have been tucked away in our playground gardens for a while now, but it seems like their growth over the last month or two has been particularly spectacular.


Of course, these plants have nothing on the kids in the Frog room!

During the summer, we teachers often marvel at the substantial growth that takes place while these kids are in our care. This is largely because summertime at Nonotuck is synonymous with transition. During the summer children move from one classroom to the next, little by little, until finally everyone is settled in their new environment, ready for the new school year. We teachers spend a lot of time going through all of our documentation from the school year, and marveling at how these children-who came to us in diapers, with baby faces and binkies- have changed into bona fide kids. Kids who can ride bikes, make rules, construct arguments, imagine stories, create art, count things, make educated guesses, form alliances, show empathy, and navigate their world with an actualized sense of autonomy that we could only see glimmers of when they came to us.

It is a significant change, and as such, we think it deserves to be marked by a bit of a ceremony.

The whole concept of Ritual is important to the Frogs. really, they view our day at school as one ritual after another. Through the school year, our rituals around cleaning up, taking turns, washing hands, eating snack, and going to sleep give the Frogs a way to take comfort in the predictability and safety of their environment, while simultaneously taking ownership over their day. When you really think about it, a ritual is a combination of a structured set of activities plus a little bit of magic. That is pretty much the definition of a three-year-olds existence right there!

For the last two years, we have marked each child's transition from the Frog room to whatever is on the horizon with a little ritual. At the beginning of the school year, we measure each child with a ribbon, which we add to a little keepsake. In the past, we have made magic wands, but this year, we opted to use simple felt "stuffies" with ribbon streamers.


On a child's last day in the Frog room, we measuring them with another ribbon and compare the two. After everyone has a chance to admire how different the two ribbons are, (and don't worry, no matter how tiny they seem, every single kid manages to grow a few inches in the Frog room!) the child gets to take this symbol of their growth down the hallway to their new cubby to take home, or onward to their new school.

This year, we decided to add another element to this ritual. As we mentioned before, our month-to-month mural seemed closed to being finished, but it wasn't quite there yet...


...Every artist needs to sign their work!

This year, after going through their ribbon ritual, we invite each child to paint their hand and press in on the mural that we have made together.


It has a few more hand-prints to go before it's "finished", but it is beautiful.

If you look closely, you'll notice that one of the hand-prints on that mural is my own.

This past Thursday was my last day at Nonotuck Community School. I've just finished going through 13 years worth of documentation of my years at Nonotuck. The change in style is mind boggling- from notes, written in magic marker on loose leaf notepaper, studded with Polaroids in a binder to this blog. It doesn’t feel like I've been doing this since before the dawn of the internet and social media when I measure the time in my own head, but when I look at those Polaroids and realize that the little kids in those pictures are all old enough to be starting college in the fall...- yeah, it’s been a while!

My perspective has changed along with my means of documenting and sharing the learning that I have been privileged to be a part of. I started out as a fresh college graduate, with a Bachelors Degree in theater and no idea that this job would become my passion and my life's work. I truly do not have the words to sum up everything that this work, these children, these families have given me.

Let's just say there isn't a ribbon long enough to measure how much I've grown here, and for that I am immeasurably grateful.

I will continue teaching at a different school, and I will post a link to the new blog that I will start there for those of you who want to follow along at home. The Frog's at Nonotuck will continue to document their experiences, along with the younger "Polliwog" class in a new blog at www.nonotucktoddlers.blogspot.com I look forward to reading about the continuing adventures of the Nonotuck toddlers, and wish you all the best of luck on the next part of your journey!

-Michelle


Thursday, June 30, 2011

Penultimate Month-To-Month Mural: SPLAT!!!
















(I could tell you a whole bunch of stuff about how this round of painting came to be, but I'm thinking that these pictures tell the story better than I ever could! Francine and I agree that it's almost done, but not quite yet...)

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Monday, June 6, 2011

May Month-to-Month Mural:Sticks

We may have cheated a bit by completing our may installment of the month-to-month mural in
June, but hey, the nice thing about self imposed, arbitrary rules is, no big deal if you break 'em!
Last week, we experienced a bit of extreme weather. We were very, very lucky to be out of the path of the worst of it. We did, however,experience high winds and hail, which left a plethora of sticks and twigs behind.
We decided to take advantage of the debris by turning them into paintbrushes!

From may mural

(Hit the "may mural" link to see more pictures)

Friday, June 3, 2011

No Escaping Eggs!

Remember how excited we were when we happened upon the Robin's nest, right when we about to start incubating chicken eggs in our classroom? Remember how impossibly serendipitous the arrival of those four little blue eggs seemed? Remember how, about two weeks ago we dropped all mention of the Robin Fledgelings as soon as the chicks showed up? Well, here's the behind the scenes story of where all the blog posts went after the chicks hatched. Bonus points! It's totally cohesive with the whole "things that come out of eggs" theme!
The weekend after the eggs hatched, I discovered some more eggs. Unfortunately, these ones were on my daughter's head, and my head too. Yup! Head lice! (Are you itching yet?) Now, I've been in this field long enough to know two things;
1.) Lice are bound to cross your path when you have kids. they are not really harmful, but they are a GIANT pain in the butt!
2.) As a teacher, no matter how much I want to go "Ewwwwww" when I see a bug that grosses me out, if I cave into that primal fear in front of a child, then chances are excellent that that same child will freak out every time they see a bug from that point forward.
So, rather than blogging that week, I spent a sizable chunk of my time combing tiny bugs and eggs out of my kid's and my own hair, plus bagging and laundering more items than were strictly necessary from a scientific standpoint. Ick.
Two positives came from this experience; First off, I now know that my "no freaking out about bugs" philosophy has panned out, at least when it comes to my own kid, since she asked to see every single thing I combed out of her hair. "Mama! That has six legs! That means it came out of an egg, right?" (Hopefully, that explains my aversion to blogging about eggs for a while...)
Second, it provided a fantastic opportunity to break out a new item that we purchased with our Terri Lynne Lokoff Child Care Foundation classroom grant money;



This thing is AWESOME! It hooks right up to a computer, fits perfectly in a kid's hand, and allows them to view and photograph images of up to 40X magnification.
(It also gives teachers who have lice related P.T.S.D some peace of mind, when applied to one's scalp.)
We broke out Zoomy and demonstrated how it worked to the kids. At first, I was concerned that they might not make the connection between the image on the screen and the object that was being magnified, but it became clear that was not the case when we heard their reaction to this first shot;

"Hey! Your hair looks like sticks!"

We encouraged the Frogs to bring over items from the classroom to look at with the digital microscope. Here are some of their finds;

I predict that we will be using this microscope a LOT! As soon as we can tear the Frogs away from watching the Robin's nest, that is...

5/25/11


6/1/11

6/1/11

6/3/11

MORE EGGS!!!!

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Real Work

Last month, we wrote about the children's growing desire for "real work", especially work that would allow them to use their muscles, engage their joints, challenge their kinesthetic sense, and, like all worthwhile work, give them a sense of accomplishment.
At first, we teachers started to make opportunities for this kind of work in our classroom space...





We added big, heavy, wooden blocks to our toy shelves for large-scale building...




...and filled bottles with interesting- and heavy- things, for lugging around, and adding to the structures that were built with the big blocks.


Of course, we all know that, this time of year, the one place where you can find an endless supply of work is outdoors! With all of the rain this spring, the grass on the playground has been shooting up like crazy!

This looks like a job for a bunch of three-year-olds, who have been ardently honing their scissor skills all winter!



We also had a big project in mind, that would require lots of help. A couple of years ago, a pink, plastic play-house mysteriously showed up on our playground. It turned out that a former student was clearing out a number of outgrown toys and thought that we could use it. Use it we did, until we realized that the Frogs had also outgrown the little pink house.

It was time for it to go in order to make way for bigger and better things!


"Oh no!!! The house got all blown down!!!" was the oft repeated, totally delighted reaction from the Frogs. the got right to work, hoisting the just-heavy-and-awkward-enough-to-be-exciting plastic chunks of house and working together to haul them all the way across the parking lot to the side of the building.

(By the way...does anybody want a slightly used, pink plastic playhouse?)

Now that we had all of this open space on the playground, we were excited to come up with some more opportunities for "real work" to do outside.

Here's where we finally wound up finding our inspiration;


Tuesday Market!!!


After hearing lots of talk from the kids about their gardens at home, and their visits to the various area farmer's markets, we decided to throw out a ball to see if they would run with it;


We set up a market area on the playground!

Their are lots of big jobs for the Frogs to do here! Filling pots with soil and water. Hauling flats of seedlings around the playground in wagons or by hand. Engaging in commerce, (pretend ice cream is the hottest selling item) and figuring out how to work together.

So far, the kids have been really into the idea! At first, they were mostly buying and selling seedlings and flowers. Now that the real farmer's market is starting to feature edible crops, we'll have to get some real produce in there!

Hooray for spring!

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Nine!

Yesterday afternoon:



This morning:


Nine peeping chicks!


Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Look!!!!!

So, I had a post all ready that had absolutely nothing to do with eggs. Really, we have a lot of other things going on...
Then this happened;



...and not ten minutes later, this;



Wow! This little guy works fast!!!
I just peeked in the incubator, and it looks like yet another chick has hatched! They are both peeping away like crazy, almost loudly enough to wake up the napping Frogs. The reason they peep so loudly is to cue the other chicks to get on with hatching.
Should be an interesting morning tomorrow!
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