Favorite Part of My Classroom and Morning Routine

I'm cheating and combining Wednesday and Thursday in a desperate attempt to catch up on the #Kinderchat Blog-A-Day challenge. 

Here is what I liked best about my classroom: 

 

Our back door opened out to the sledding hill. This led to our morning routine in preschool. In the winter, I coach the parents to send their kids all ready dressed in their winter gear and we start the day outside sledding on the hill. We can get a good 30 to 40 minutes of high energy gross motor time when the Vermont temperature cooperates. 

Then, we go in and have the rest of our preschool day. The kids are really ready to buckle down and do the preschool routine. The best part is, we only have to help kids get their winter gear OFF. When they go home from preschool, they do not need everything. 

That makes out morning routine go something like this:

1. Meet me outside for sledding as you arrive in the classroom.

2. Everyone helps put the sleds away after the "last time down the hill."

3. Line up and go back into the school.

4. Remove wet boots before we go into the classroom.

5. Take off snow clothes, jackets and put them away and change into indoor shoes

6. Wash hands

7. Do name writing practice

8. Choose an activity from the morning choice board

9. When everyone is ready, we have morning meeting. 

 

Five Things in My Backpack

I have never been good at carrying a purse. I can do a wallet, a tiny wallet that hooks on my keychain and carries essentials: credit card (singular), ATM card, driver's license and a few bills cash.

I am a backpack girl.

And, in my backpack, I always have these five things:

1. Laptop: Don't leave home without it. I just got a shiny new Macbook Pro and it is slim and sleek and I love it. I am typing on it right now and loving every word it produces. While I have an iPad and it travels well, the laptop has the really important stuff: presentations, story ideas, blog ideas, and, sometimes, I just need a real keyboard to compose my thoughts,.

2. Pens: Lots of pens, because I leave them places and then need to replace them in my backpack. And, I always have purple on hand for grading papers, because I feel it is friendlier than red.

3. Extra Sunglasses: I keep a pair in the car, but always have a spare in my backpack. My eyes are incredibly light sensitive and my sunglasses have my distance prescription. I need them more in the winter, when the sun reflects off the bright snow, than I do in the summer. If I do not have them on a sunny day, I can almost guarantee I'll have a headache by 4 p.m.

4. Thumb Drive: Just in case I need to get information on the fly.

5. Headphones: Never know when the opportunity to tune the world out will come up and I can grab some "me" time and jam to Spearhead, Elton John, the Indigo Girls, or the Beatles. I don't want to pass up tha chance to keep building the soundtrack to my life. 

Camelot and the Beatles

 If I could live in any historical era, I would live in the US in the 1960's.

Technically, I was alive in the 60's, but I wasn't old enough to have an awareness of what was going on around me. And, I only spent my infant and toddler years in the 60's. I started preschool in 1971. 

I have always felt like I missed the boat by being born in the latter part of the 60's and I would have liked to at least have been a teenager during that time. 

Why? Why would anyone want to live through the tumultuous Civil Rights, Vietnam protests and the assassination of JFK? That decade shaped so much of what the world has become. While there were unsettling events, there were also some of the most amazing things happening. What I wouldn't give to have seen the Beatles perform together, live, anywhere, or to have been present at any one of Martin Luther King speeches. I wish I had been around to vote for Kennedy. 

I probably would have been protesting the war, but I certainly would not have been at Woodstock. I may have tried to get myself to the Newport Folk Festival at least once. I may have gone to the Supreme Court the first Monday in October in 1967 to see Thurgood Marshall take the bench for the first time.

I would have been so much more aware of the the Moon Landing. I just can't remember it since I had just had my 2nd birthday when Neil Armstrong left the Eagle and walked on the Sea of Tranquility. 

I have always wanted to experience the 60's first-hand, not as a documentary on PBS. While I know it is not to far out of my wheelhouse, I think it is the most interesting time in in our history. 

 

 

When I Grow Up...

When I was little I wanted to be a veterinarian. I held onto this dream for so long that I even went so far as to choose Latin as my language in high school because I thought it would help me with the medical and animal terms I would need to learn later in veterinary school. 

I can't remember when the dream died. I still love animals, and I have many that live with me, but I changed my focus to writing at some point in high school. I joined the newspaper staff my sophomore year and loved it. It was my reason for going to school. It was a pretty prestigious high school paper and I got state-wide and national awards. I even went on to major in journalism as an undergrad. 

Every year in my preschool classroom, I compiled pictures and videos from the whole year and presented it on the last day as a DVD yearbook. Each parent gets a copy. One of my favorite parts of the video is when I ask the kids what they want to be when they grow up. Here is an example from one year. 

Link to "When I Grow Up" Video

 

When I do this project, I let the kids say whatever they want. I don't want to influence it, even if what they say they want to be when they grow up is fairly unattainable (i.e. the butterfly). I have had so many thoughtful and interesting answers to this question over the years. For a while, there were a few kids who wanted to be a Power Ranger or Spiderman. One year, one boy said he wanted to be a volcanologist, which at the time I would say was true. He loved volcanoes (as do I, so he and I talked about volcanoes a lot that year). One girl wanted to be a dog. I must admit, that thought has crossed my own mind at times. They do have the life if they fall into the hands of the right owner. 

Now, when I answer this question, as I often do for the video, I say that I want to be an astrophysicist. If I went back and did school all over again, that is where I would go. I love space exploration and the existential crisis I have every time I think of the vastness of the universe. And then I start thinking of string theory and the possibility of parallel universes and my mind explodes. I love it. 

The truth is, though, I love being a teacher, whether it be of preschoolers, undergraduates, graduates, or professionals. No other profession allows me to delve into my many interests and passions as much. Though, arguably, I could have pursued many different interests in journalism by reporting on them, but you get there faster in the world of teaching.

Pressure

The best thing about 2013 for me personally was going to Hawaii and trying snorkeling for the first (but in no way the last) time. 

But, with my students, my favorite part of 2013 was a number of science explorations that we did with pressure. 

It started way back in December 2012, when we made popcorn the old fashioned way, in a popcorn popper, not a microwave. Unless they go the movies with any regularity, many young children no longer see popcorn popping because it comes from a bag in the microwave. 

We read Tomie de Paola's Popcorn Book. and found out that the reason popcorn pops is because there is a tiny bit of water in each kernel. When the kernel gets hot in the oil in the pan, the water pressure builds as the water expands and turns to steam in the heat. We used the word pressure to talk about the water pushing so hard on the outside of the kernel that eventually it popped it open. While we watched the popcorn, we could see steam coming out of the top vent of the popper...more evidence that Tomie was telling it to us straight. 

The next big pressure experience had to do with volcanoes (since I went to Hawaii). I brought back video from Hawaii of lava flowing in one of the vents on Kilauea. We were already talking about dinosaurs in the classroom, since it was a huge area of interest for the kids. We made a model volcano. First, I got a big plastic platter with a rim. I put a tall, skinny thick glass vase in the middle. We made home made play dough and built the mountain up around the tube. Last, we used modeling clay to make the outer layer, because it would not break down as quickly from repeated eruptions and lava flows. Then, just for fun, we put a bunch of plastic dinosaurs and trees at the base of the volcano.

Once the volcano was constructed, I put baking soda in the tube. Then the kids chose what color "lava" they wanted. We mixed food coloring and vinegar in a paper cup. If they chose a color that required mixing (like purple) we figured out which colors we had to mix. Then, each child in turn poured their cup of vinegar into the lava chamber and we watched the eruption. Most of the time the dinosaurs and trees got covered with lava.

Again, I was able to talk with them about how the middle of the earth is hot and, like the water in the popcorn, when the magma gets heated up, it gets pushed up by the pressure and causes the lava to come out of the volcano. 

In the spring, we carried out the Mentos and Diet Coke experiment. I was able to get a Mentos geyser apparatus that fits on top of a Diet Coke bottle. It allows you to pull out a pin to drop the Mentos into the bottle with a minimum of stickiness.  We learned that the reaction activates the carbonation in the Diet Coke. The gas builds up inside the bottle, putting pressure on the inside, and it pushes the soda up out of the top of the tube. We did this outside. Each time, we varied the number of Mentos that we loaded in to notice the difference in the height of the geyser.

The last pressure experience we had was making rockets. A parent of one of my former students is a amateur rocket builder. He helped all of the kids build their own rockets and we had an official "Launch Day" the second to last week of school. This way, we could, "blast off to kindergarten." In the classroom, we were talking about the night sky. The kids learned that the engine pushed hot air down with so much pressure that it pushed the rocket into the sky. 

The whole school came out to watch us blast 18 rockets into the sky. The middle school kids acted as the recovery team, going into the field where most of the rockets came down to bring them back to the preschoolers. 

 

One Resolution for 2014

My one small professional resolution for 2014 is to get my blog up and going in a regular fashion, at least once a week, if not more. That is why I joined the challenge. I have to remember that I don't have to blog a huge article every time I post, and the prompts at #kinderchat are reminding me of that. I already have a bunch of great ideas bubbling in my head for when I get to blogging outside of the challenge. I am keeping a "notes" page on my phone for when ideas for subjects pop into my head. 

My bigger professional resolution is to never miss an opportunity to talk about inclusion for children with disabilities. In Vermont, we have a lot of excellent inclusive practices, and children are included with their non-disabled peers in the regular classrooms at a high percentage, but there are still places that have separate classrooms for children with "intensive needs," and there are still children being taught a pretty separate curriculum in the back of the room or in a resource room with a para educator. 

Ultimately, I would like "special education" to disappear because all teachers would learn to teach all children who come through their classroom doors.

2014 January Blog-A-Day Challenge

So, as if I don't have enough going on in my life this month, I just saw this post on Twitter and I think I am going to use it to get my blog going. 

The Kindergarten Scoop It blog aggregate site is giving prompts for each day of the month. Since I am not in a classroom anymore, I will post ideas I would have had when the prompt applies to the classroom. 

Today's prompt is just to post a picture that represents 2013. It supposed to be wordless, but I have a difficult time not talking.

 

This was a snow shoeing field trip that my preschool class took in February 2013. This photo represents the changes in 2013. This was my last group of preschoolers, since I resigned in June and moved into the Consulting, Training, and Higher Education world. 

This field trip was such a challenge in many ways for the kids. For some, it was the first time they had ever been on snowshoes, so they had to figure out how to change their gate to traverse the trail in the woods. For others, they were challenged to work on the orienteering skills, following the blazes for the trail as we made our way through. And still others were in charge of looking for trees and animal tracks for the whole class to work on identifying. We took pictures and checked out field guides when we returned to the classroom.

I like that we are all together around a snowman we made when the trek was over. After we successfully made it through the woods, we still had enough energy and motivation to do a group project. I will miss being in a preschool classroom every day. This picture wraps that feeling up for me.