What Motivates Me

There's a song I sing when it's time to gather around for circle time, our community meetings. It's something I made up, I think, although it probably grew from a kernel planted by one of my mentors. It always starts off the same way, "Come on over to the checker board rug, come on over to the checker board rug, come on over to the checker board rug, and have a seat on the floor . . ." After that, it can pretty much go off on any number of tangents, each one sillier than the last, usually inspired by something one of the kids has done or said. It's just a way to goof around until everyone is settled in. And then, since I typically don't have anything specific planned, we usually just goof around together some more. In a nutshell, that's the Teacher Tom method.

Honestly, I was never particularly motivated to become a teacher. There were a couple of my high school teachers to whom I looked up, but that had more to do with my perception of their lifestyle as teachers -- being cool role models, coaching sports teams after school, having pretty wives -- than anything to do with helping kids' brains grow bigger. Even when I finally became a father, I had little interest in teaching our baby anything: I just wanted to goof around with her.

People assume I'm interested in pedagogy and curricula and brain development, and I am, I suppose. I've done just enough reading, and taken just enough classes, and attended just enough workshops, to have a working knowledge of most of what's out there, but everything I know about teaching, really, I've acquired more by osmosis than any sort of concentrated study, and frankly, I rarely think about any of it anyway. Likewise, I'm not all that interested in knowing about spectrums or disorders or syndromes or any other kind of diagnosis. I'm not ignorant of them, of course, and I recognize that there is value in this kind of knowledge, but it generally only reveals such a tiny piece of what makes a child who he or she is that it borders on the irrelevant, at least when it comes to the way I do "teaching."

And speaking of irrelevant, I know and care even less about much of the stuff my public school colleagues talk about, like "Common Core," or "WASL Tests," or all those various certifications and qualifications and whatnot. I mean, I've looked into some of it, and found it has so little in common with what I do on a day-to-day basis that it hardly looks at all to me like what I call "teaching." If it wasn't threatening to take over the whole of what we call "education" in America, I would gladly ignore it entirely.

As I'm gearing up for my trip to Australia and New Zealand, where I'll be presenting and facilitating education workshops (information and links at the bottom of this post), people are expressing enthusiasm for learning more about my approach, methodology, and pedagogy. And that's what I'm going to talk about, although I'll never be able to offer a tidy list of "10 Tips" or "12 Steps To Success." I'll probably mostly talk about the fine art of goofing off with kids.

You see, I came into teaching through a back door, not even really knowing where I was, to be honest, holding my own daughter's hand. We found a bunch of kids there and started playing with them. Everyone called it "school," so we did too. I was never particularly motivated to become a teacher, but when I saw what my mentors Sue Anderson and Chris David did in their little cooperative classrooms, I was motivated to do that.

We spent our time together at this kind of school mostly just goofing around, although by virtue of being adults we occasionally had to work with children to help them be safe, to treat one another fairly, to express our emotions in healthy, productive ways. But that wasn't our "curriculum," heavens no, all of that adult stuff was just by way of getting back to the core of why we were together: to have an interesting time goofing around.

I'm still not particularly motivated to be a teacher, but I do enjoy being Teacher Tom. I love nothing more than dropping to my knees and playing with the children, talking with them, listening to them, being their friend. My main job, as I do it, is just to find a way to get each kid on my bandwagon, which can only be done by forging a relationship based upon a two-way street of listening, acceptance, and love -- and a sacred agreement that no one is the "boss" of anyone else. The rest is just goofing off together. 

I may not be motivated to be a teacher, but I am motivated by the unique joys and challenges of creating a relationship with each child. It's endlessly amazing to me that the more I've done this, coming to a place called school each day to goof around with kids, that there is still so much more to learn, that there is always a deeper depth and a higher height and a sillier way to sing that old song. 

Finding those new places is what motivates me; finding them with the kids, going there together, then goofing off. That's what motivates me.

Australia/New Zealand Tour information

I will be Down Under for the first couple weeks of August. Here's the itinerary:

Aug. 2 -- Brisbane

Aug. 3-4 -- Shoal Bay

Aug. 8 -- Melbourne

Aug. 9 -- Adelaide

Aug. 10 -- Perth

Aug. 13 -- Auckland

Aug. 17 -- Christchurch

For details and registration information, click here, the scroll down until you find the event your interested in. I look forward to meeting all you Aussies and Kiwis!

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Kids In The House: Honoring A Child's Unique Voice

When I first started teaching, my approach to circle time was to let kids speak out at their own pace. I'd ask for hands to be raised, we'd take turns talking, if someone was struggling with the whole hand raising business, I'd remind them that the way to get a turn was to raise your hand, then reward that child the second the hand flickered over her head. As for the kids who never spoke, I didn't want to put pressure on them. When they had something to say to all of us, I theorized, they would let us know. I took a great deal of pride in the fact that every child, even if some did so very eventually, at one point or another, contributed to our group discussions over the course of the year.

I think it was during my third year teaching that one boy's mom said to me, "Colin really wants to talk during circle time, but he doesn't understand raising his hand." I explained my theory to her. She nodded, "Still, I think he would like it if you just called on him." So I tried it, and sure enough, he had something to say.

It was one of those small epiphanies for me. While we still favor hand raising at circle time, it's the way you know you're going to get a turn to speak, it's not the only way to be heard. You see, as I've increasingly come to understand the importance and power of a democratic classroom, I've sought to expand what I learned through Colin to help children who are either unwilling or not yet able to assert themselves in our community meetings.

During our discussions these days, I'm constantly looking for the tale-tell signs of engagement beyond a hand raised high in the air. It might be a smile or a scowl. Maybe it's how her body is leaned forward or  her jaw is set, as if fighting the urge to speak. Sometimes it will be the fact that his head is on a swivel, closely following the verbal ebb and flow. I might say something like, "Frank doesn't look like he likes that idea," or "Betsy looks excited about that." Sometimes it's all that's needed to unlock their words for us all to hear. I try to avoid the pressure of a direct question, something like "Cindy, do you have something to say?" but I've done it, sometimes to be answered with a bashful shrug, but just as often our community benefits from the gush of words the question has uncorked.

If we're really going to be a democracy we need to hear from everyone. Where I once took pride in entire school years during which everyone contributed during circle time, I now feel like we've somehow failed when we go a week without hearing every voice at least once.

And with that preface, I'll leave you with one of the short videos I made with Kids In The House. This is the third I've shared here on the blog. The others are here and here. If you want to watch all of the 18, you can always view them over at Kid's In The House: just search for "Tom Hobson." But before you head over there, make sure to pour another cup of coffee because with more than 8,000 videos from some 350 early childhood experts to choose from, you might be there awhile.

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Something Else I've Found To Be True

Several years ago, we had a Pre-K class comprised of eight girls and one boy, the kind of demographic quirk that happens in a small school like ours. I like to really go with the flow with this small class of oldest kids, following their energy and interests, letting thing ramble and rumble from one thing to the next. It was getting near the end of our day, when I noticed Sam sitting on the corner of the rug on which we tend to convene for discussions. His body was twisted into a sort of awkward pretzel, muscles tense with the effort, his face clenched in concentration, although he wasn't focused on what we were doing, but rather, it dawned on me, on the effort of staying seated on the rug.

Holy crap! I realized, we'd been more or less sitting on the damn rug all day. As the girls intensely engaged whatever process in which we where involved, Sam was engaged in willing his body to sit quietly. I forced a wrap-up of the discussion and we spent the final 30 minutes basically running in circles, an activity that Sam engaged with the joy of a freed prisoner.

I was reminded of Sam yesterday as I was taking part in dismantling, disposing, recycling and reusing the floats that were part of the Fremont Summer Solstice Parade on Saturday. I was chatting with a guy who asked, "How many of your students would you say have ADHD or something like that?"

I answered, "None I know of. Of course, the way our school operates it would be impossible to tell because the kids almost always have the option to be on their feet and the freedom to pretty much do and go where their interests taking them."

He said, "I'm just asking because I read that something like 10 percent of kids have ADHD and for boys it's closer to 15 percent." (I've checked and these numbers are more or less accurate, although some studies have the percentages being higher.)

"Oh, I'm sure there are some at our school, but since the symptomatic behaviors don't show up as problems, there's no way for me to know."

He grumbled, "You know ADHD is adaptive for the human species. It's part of our past as hunters. If we didn't have ADHD, we probably wouldn't have survived."

I've heard this before. In fact, it's an hypothesis first proposed by author and radio host Thom Hartmann in which he suggests that the hyper-focus, distractibility, and other aspects of the condition were necessary traits in the hunter societies that preceded agrarian ones, a theory that has a growing body of scientific support. In many aspects of our lives, such as the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool, these traits don't turn up as problematic, although they are maladaptive in some contemporary environments such as traditional schools. The fact that the incidence of ADHD is higher in boys, according to this theory, is linked to the tendency in most of these ancient societies for the males to be the hunters.

I was reminded of Sam not because I think he has ADHD, but because he is a boy, and boys tend to need to move their bodies more when they are learning. I use the word "tend" here purposefully. Of course, girls need to move their bodies too, and of course there are boys who would have had no problem with hanging out on our rug for most of the day. We're all on a continuum when it comes to all human behaviors, but there is no denying that there is something going on with boys when it comes to traditional schools:

Boys get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls. Boys are diagnosed with learning disorders and attention problems at nearly four times the rate of girls. They do less homework and get a greater proportion of the low grades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school, and make up only 43 percent of college students. Furthermore, boys are nearly three times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Considering 11 percent of US children -- 6.4 million in all -- have been diagnosed with a ADHD, that's a lot of boys bouncing around US classrooms.

I was reminded of Sam simply because he was a boy amongst girls in a preschool environment in which ADHD behaviors don't usually show up as problems; where it's impossible to tell the difference between a typical 5-year-old boy and one with a learning disorder.

Last year was my first teaching our new 5's class, which, as is true of almost every 5's program of which I'm aware, was "boy heavy." By design, we were almost constantly on our feet, spending more than half our days outdoors even in the depths of winter. Yes, we did sit down together at least once each day for circle time, but it became clear from the start that no one was going to sit still for a teacher-lead approach. If this was going to work, it would have to be a collaborative effort, one that involved us doing something together, often with a common objective of some sort. Our daily "Show and Tell" sessions, which was not something I had ever planned on, was an idea that came from the kids (one of the girls actually). As it evolved (becoming known, alternatively, as "Show and Smell" or "Show and Yell") all I had to do was make sure there was a big box by the door and the kids took care of the rest. Together, they would carry the box down the hallway and onto the rug, usually chanting, "Make way for the Show and Tell box." Together, they came up with conventions such as "The Demonstration Zone," which was a strip of un-carpeted floor better suited for showing off things like wheeled vehicles; "Everybody to the borders!" which meant that we needed to leave the center of the rug clear for a performance of some kind; limiting each child to one show and tell item per week, an innovation that came about when our daily sessions were getting far too long for our attention spans; and, for the same reason, saying, "You're losing your audience," by way of letting someone know it was time to wrap things up.

We figured out many other things we liked to do while sitting on the rug such as "going on adventures," which involved me managing stories we created together by raising our hands and taking turns coming up with plot twists. We enjoyed taking turns using our karaoke machine to "top" each other with made-up jokes. We could spend a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy on debating our classroom rules or discussing classroom problems like when we were trying to figure out what to do about our burglar. When there was something about which I wanted to instruct them, such as when we were dissecting squid, I had to leave lots of space for them to share their own knowledge about the topic. And believe it or not, I would often look at the clock and realize that this roomful of mostly 5-year-old boys had been "sitting" on our rug (which for this class I interpreted as simply remaining on the rug) for 45 minutes. I want to repeat that: 45 minutes! That's as long as most of my college lectures.

The Atlantic article from which I quoted above provides a nice list of ideas for how to structure "lessons" so as to be more successful with teaching boys, all of which I can say are true from my own experience. I encourage you to take a look at it. The conclusion of the piece is a call to teachers:

Educators should strive to teach all children, both girls and boys by acknowledging, rather than dismissing, their particular and distinctive educational needs.

Here's the thing with which I quibble about the article, which is mostly spot on: this is not about girls v. boys. As David Katz, then the director of the alternative Giddens School here in Seattle, once said to me, "Most progressive schools have a waiting list of boys, but not for girls. It's a real prejudice that only boys need this kind of education. Girls tend to look like they're sitting down and doing the work wherever they are, but that's just because they don't fidget around so much. Girls just tend to be better at behaving -- that doesn't mean that they learn better by sitting in chairs, shutting up, and facing forward." This is something else I've found to be true.

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Following The Leader

When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.     ~Derek Sivers

Back in our pre-preschool days, years before I ever considered becoming a teacher of any kind, my daughter Josephine and I used to attend a Gymboree class once a week. It was essentially an open gym with lots of mats and climbing apparatuses appropriate for the under 2 set, followed by a robust circle time lead by a woman whose name I've forgotten, but whose energy and enthusiasm lives on in me almost every day.

It was never explicitly stated whether or not the adults were expected to join in the singing and group large motor activities, but after a couple sessions it was clear to me that the parents who sat and watched this circle time tended to have the children who sat and watched, whereas those of us who jumped up and down and wiggled our fannies along with the teacher had children who participated.

Those who know me today may find it hard to believe, but overcoming the sense that I would look like a great big oafish fool was a major challenge for me, one only made possible by what I considered to be the best interests of my child. I was impressed by this Gymboree teacher, an adult woman, no longer young, who threw herself into this activity without any apparent shame or reservation. So while carefully avoiding eye contact with any of the moms in the room (and they were all moms in those days) I threw myself into it, following her lead the way I wanted Josephine to do it. But the Gymboree teacher forced her eye contact on me, just like I was one of the kids, welcoming me with a smile, drawing me into the center of this movement of children and parents, swinging our hips and chanting things like, "Wishy washy, wishy washy, wishy washy, weeeeeee!"

It's just one kid sitting on the giant tube.

The first follower is quickly followed by the second.

And now we have a movement!

Most of us, if pressed, would admit to wishing leadership skills on our child, and we should, I think. The ability to lead with confidence is a relatively rare and vital talent. What we don't say aloud, however, but what is far more important throughout most of our lives is acquiring "followship" skills. It's hard to even write that because, of course, no one wants to raise their child to be a mere follower. The word connotes mindless devotion, giving into peer pressure, being a lamb lead to slaughter. We want strong children who know their own minds, who can say, No!" when it doesn't feel right, who can blaze their own trail, and all of those things are true, but what is also true is that we spend much more of our lives as followers than leaders, if only because it's exhausting to always be at the head of the parade.

There is great power in following, more than is generally credited. The ability to unselfishly look at what someone else is doing and, with an open mind, say to yourself, That looks great. I want to do it too! is really the foundation upon which all meaningful human activity is built.  I was inspired yesterday by a video a friend forwarded to me, and the commentary by Derek Sivers, founder of Muckworks and Now Now Now. It struck me as I watched the video over and over that as much as we claim to value leadership, we spend most of our time with young children helping them learn to contribute as followers in a proper and meaningful way. In our leadership roles as teachers we strive to make things so simple that they are instructional. When we're at our best we understand that the children following us are our equals. And if we really watch what's going on in our classrooms, the rest of the kids are, more often than not, following the other children, not us the teachers.

When we fail as teachers, and we all do, I think it's often because what we are doing simply isn't great enough or instructional enough to attract that first follower. But when we succeed, once we've inspired that first follower, watch out!

But just watch the video, it says it much better than I can:

"The first follower transformed the lone nut into a leader. The best way to make a movement is to be the first follower and show others how to follow." As the tipping point is past in this video and all of those people who were once uncomfortably, perhaps mockingly, watching a lone hippie dancer begin to leap to their feet and rush to be part of his movement, it moves me almost to tears. What a powerful thing we become when we are able to move beyond our self-consciousness, our sense of shame, and leap into something new, even if, this time, it's only because we feel hidden in the larger group. Maybe next time, we'll be the first follower.

Indeed, as teachers we do spend most of our time helping our charges learn followship skills. And that's as it should be because they, like all of us, will spend most of our lives not leading, but making judgments about who and what to follow, then following them, not just because others are following, but because they see a lone nut doing something great and have the courage to stand up and join in.

That's why we must, as much as possible, give kids a choice about whether or not, and when, to follow. Compelling children only teaches obedience to leaders, a dangerous thing. But choice in the classroom gives them the opportunity to really practice how to follow, to learn to think for themselves, to not follow blindly, but rather with the idea of expanding the great thing that lone nut is doing.

And when we're the lone nut, we'll know how to treat our followers.

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I Want Turquoise Carpets

I want turquoise carpets and turquoise shoes.

I want turquoise papers with all the turquoise news.

I want turquoise only, not teal or aquamarine.

I've seen my future and it's a shade of bluish green.

~Jim White, Turquoise House

An era ended last week at Woodland Park. We've been preparing for it for a week or more, and it's time, and it had to end sometime, and all the rest of it, but there is an extra heaviness in my heart this morning as I allow myself to feel the passing of the era of the Blue Rug.

Before the Blue Rug, there was the Green Rug, which was also referred to as the "square hexagon" due to the irregular, angular masking tape lines laid down by a previous teacher in a failed effort to get 2-year-olds to actually sit in a circle. Its successor, the Blue Rug, a glorified 15'X12' remnant, has been with us for the past 9 years, serving as a place to sit, raise hands, sing, tell stories, give compliments, make rules, dance, build, and wrestle for hundreds of children.

Never again will I sing what is probably the unofficial anthem of Woodland Park:

Come on over to the Blue Rug.

Come on over to the Blue Rug.

Come on over to the Blue Rug.

And have a seat on the floor.

Right near the end of last year, a couple of the parents in our Pre-3's class began to worry about our rugs. Their main concern was the rug under our sensory table, which, of course, often gets wet, and has suffered from a few growths of mildew. This conversation expanded to include the topics of off-gassing, mold, durability, and natural fibers, leading to the idea to replace both rugs, a concept that came to be embraced, or at least not opposed, by a majority of our families. As a cooperative preschool, this is how things often happen.

As the owners of the school, these parents then set about figuring out what, in their ideal world, they would rather have under their children's bottoms and feet. Something tough and non-toxic, of course, easy to clean, mildew resistant, and attractive. 

This rug isn't only where we convene for circle time, but also a place for constructive and dramatic play. We are already seeing, even before the rug was installed, how the square tiles impact how the children play.

To be honest, I was not on board. I mean, new rugs would be nice, but I was more inclined to either stick with the Blue Rug, which I felt just needed a good cleaning, or if we must replace it, to do so with another cheap remnant. But, you know, it's not my school: it belongs to the families. I'll always assert my opinion when it comes to matters of curriculum or pedagogy, but this was not that. Besides as the discussions progressed, it started to become evident to me that we weren't really going to replace the Blue Rug. The parents had settled on the absolute "gold standard" for preschool carpeting: they wanted to build one from carpet tiles manufactured by FLOR. By the time they priced it out we were looking at a price tag well beyond our budget, and with the school calendar running out on us, there just wasn't going to be time to do the fundraising, let alone go through the processes required to get all 3 of the Woodland Park schools to approve the expenditure. And even while the process did make me begin to covet a FLOR carpet, I figured once we broke for the summer the momentum would fail and the whole episode would only continue to survive as a few meager lines in our meeting minutes.

Squares on squares.

Now let me tell you, despite my best penny pinching efforts, I became through this process a fan of the FLOR product. For one thing, our parents with architecture and design backgrounds were enthusiastic about FLOR from the start, some of whom had used their products both personally and professionally, saying they are worth every penny. When I mentioned it to my wife, a home design hobbyist, she said, "Oh, that's the best." Made from recycled materials, built for both beauty and abuse, and flexible: it was the flexibility perhaps more than anything else that swayed me. If we somehow managed to completely ruin one of the 20"X20" squares, which is possible in our very messy school, we could simply replace the tile, not the whole rug.

Ah, but as we went into the summer, my private predictions had come true. We'd not managed to figure out a way to swing it, the summer program spends all it's time outdoors where the Blue Rug was off the radar, and I was quite certain it would be years before the subject came up again. 

I was wrong. At the summer board meeting of our new Pre-3's class, our new health and safety officer, said, "Last year's class voted to replace the rugs in the classroom, but they couldn't afford it. We don't have to honor their intentions, but I think we should." And we were off, ultimately getting all 3 of the Woodland Park schools on board.

The tiles are held together by these adhesive dots.

The new FLOR tiles arrived a couple weeks ago. I pulled a few samples from the boxes and spread them on a counter for the parents to see as they arrived. We needed a few volunteers to offer to come in on a weekend or evening to install it and I figured this would be a good way to motivate folks. After a couple days, however, I was too excited, so just brought them into the classroom where we let the kids play with them, making their own patterns and paths. I love that we had this opportunity for all of us to transition from the old to the new.

And yesterday was installation day. Liam's mom Abigail and Rhys and Maya's mom Christina met me in the classroom at noon. The actual installation of a 15'X12' and a 8'X5' rugs took about 30 minutes. We spent more time sweeping, mopping, and hauling the old rugs out to Abigail's pick-up than we did on the actual installation.

I didn't shed a tear for the Blue Rug as I saw it packed up and ready for its final trip to the dump. I could clearly see in the light of day that it was a ratty, stained old thing. We now have a rug made from cool, fresh turquoise, teal, and "tidal" colored squares. What will we call it? Maybe the Turquoise Rug -- we sing a good song about that color. Maybe the Checker Board Rug. Maybe it'll be the Bluish-Green Rug. I guess I'll have to wait until Monday and let the kids decide.

We settled on a fairly straight forward pattern. Maybe we should have gone with something more random. Or perhaps we could have used one color to create a sort of "Teacher Tom zone" up near the front to keep kids from crowding in too closely. The good news is we can change it if we decide we want something different.

Some people get frustrated by a cooperative process. It's not always fast but it's a process that does work to make good things happen, one into which we've all by now bought. The result is that the "third teacher" got a make-over. I can't wait to see what it does for all of us.

Oh, and we also got that new sensory table rug that started the whole thing.

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Are Any Of Them More Important Than This?

From the time we decided last Spring that we would for sure run an afternoon 5's program this year until about mid-summer, I felt quite a bit of pressure to come up with at least a daily schedule to show prospective families. I had kind of an idea, of course, but I dragged my feet as long as I could, reluctant to commit to anything. After all, I'd taught 5-year-olds before, but never an entire classroom full of them. How could I possibly know what would work until I was actually in the midst of it?

One thing I'd not planed on, for instance, was show-and-tell, but on our second day of class, as we convened on our blue rug for circle time, Elena raised her hand and proposed it, saying, "Everybody brings things from their house to show everybody and tell them about it -- show and tell." Her new friends were enthusiastic, so I figured why not? It's a classic early years school activity, providing great public speaking practice, and had the shining virtue of having emerged directly from from the kids. I was tempted, on the spot, to suggest some guidelines, you know, so it didn't get out of hand with the potential for 18 kids bringing something every day, but decided on the spot to let that part emerge as well, in the form of waiting to cross that bridge when we came to it.

When a kid announces that s/he needs to use the "demonstration zone," everyone turns their backs on me in order to focus on the strip of bare floor just off the other end of the rug. The kids in the front row, kneel, while the ones in the back stand. This is a system they have pretty much worked out on their own. 

By the end of the second week, this activity having become by far the most popular thing we do at circle time, we were standing ready to cross that span. After a day in which we spent over 30 minutes alone on show-and-tell, I wondered aloud if we shouldn't come up with a system by which each child only brought in one item per week. I was surprised when the kids, as a body, were in favor of this, and we devised a system. I informed them that I'd send an email to their parents detailing our agreement, but forgot.

The following day, kicking myself for having forgotten, I braced myself for another long session, but when I looked in to the show-and-tell box, I only saw 5 items. I said, "We only have a few things today."

Wyatt raised his hand, "That's because we're only supposed to bring one thing every week."

I found that hard to believe, frankly. "Really? Hey, raise your hands if you brought a show-and-tell item today."

Five hands went up: the five hands our new system would have predicted. "No way! You guys remembered that? I forgot to send an email to your parents. Now I don't have to. I'm impressed." This was not empty praise.

The "demonstration zone" is a little crowded on this day, with all those blocks encroaching on the space, but it's pretty impressive the way the kids, for the most part, keep themselves on the rug while their friends share their show-and-tell items.

For more than a month now, show-and-tell has been self-regulating. Occasionally, a kid or two has violated the system, but only when they have something particularly exciting to show us. What most of the kids seem to be doing is bringing in their favorite/newest toys. We've innovated what we call "the demonstration zone," a piece of bare floor just off the rug, in which, if you have something that requires demonstrating, you have the space in which to show us what you've got. It's a functional, but awkward solution to the children's natural inclination to crowd around. I'm thinking we may have to devise a more formal "demonstration zone," like a large round of plywood, that can be deployed in the center of the blue rug. (We could just make a circle on the rug with tape, but many of the demonstrations involve vehicles which need a harder surface upon which to operate, hence the plywood idea.)

At first, I asked our presenters questions about their items, guiding them through the telling part of the activity, but by now most of them need very little prompting. This means that I am increasingly able to just sit back and let the kids go, which is the gold standard in a play-based classroom.

Yesterday, however, our first day back after the Thanksgiving break, the show-and-tell box was full to the brim, our system having clearly broken down. I'm hoping it's just that there was a lot of pent-up demand after a few days off. It took us 45 full minutes to get through circle time. Forty-five minutes! That's unheard of, yet every one of the kids was engaged, the moving back and forth between the demonstration zone and the "regular zone" apparently serving as enough physical action for the squirrel-ier kids. Forty-five minutes is almost as long as my college classes.

I may still have to send that email to the parents, reminding them of our show-and-tell system, but not yet. Show-and-tell is still evolving, a process that so far has emerged entirely from the kids. There is a real temptation to just let that be our circle time for awhile -- it's what the kids most want to do, there's very little adult "management" required, and we're learning more and more about our friends. Indeed, there are other good things to do at circle time that aren't getting done, but are any of them more important than this?

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How An Emergent Curriculum Works: "That's Why They Have To Be Burglars"

(For the past 4 days, I've been using examples from our classroom by way of trying to define what we mean at Woodland Park when we call what we do an "emergent curriculum." In one case our "project" emerged as if by some sort of wordless magic. In the second post, I described a "project" that emerged from my own agenda. In the third, post I discussed a full day of learning about spiders that the children constructed from their own collective knowledge and experience. Yesterday's post was about a dramatic play project sparked by the driving interest of a single student. Today is a look at how real life events lead to real life solutions.) 

A couple weeks ago, upon arriving at school, I unlocked the storage room to find stuff scattered all over the floor. It took me a few minutes to figure out what had happened, but finally realized that someone had broken a window and apparently knocked things down while climbing in. We lease our space from the Fremont Baptist Church. When I told Pastor Judy, she knew what had likely happened. Neighbors had complained the night before about some guys who had been sleeping in the alleyway behind the church and she'd had to call to police. "They were mad at me." We later found vulgarities written on the alley side of the church as well.

The window faces onto our outdoor classroom, so as our 5's assembled out there, we began to talk of the "burglar." No one seemed particularly worried, but several of them were quite excited, concocting all kinds of ideas about what we ought to do. Finally, one of the kids joked that we should have The Troll come protect our school, which lead someone else to suggest that we ask The Troll what to do. There was a lot of enthusiasm for this idea so we marched ourselves one block to where our street intersects with Troll Way and climbed up on The Troll's hand, where we closed our eyes and silently asked The Troll what to do. I believe it was Duncan who informed us that The Troll told him that we should use "sharp needles," then amazingly we learned that he'd given pretty much the same advice to all of us, in addition to such other ideas as nailing a piece of wood over the broken window, devising a trap, somehow employing "invisible broken glass," and using poison.

Back at school we continued our discussion, making a list of what we ought to do about the "burglar." There was some debate about the poison. "We don't want to kill him!" 

"No, it'll just be sleeping poison. Then when he wakes up we can tell him we don't want him to break the window again."

That settled, we surveyed our list. Cooper raised his hand, "I know! We could just put that list on the door, then when the burglar comes again, he'll just be scared!"

It was a good discussion about a real world event. By the time we returned to the outdoor classroom later in the day, Wally, the church's building maintenance guy, had already knocked off the first thing on our list: nailing wood over the broken window. The kids later checked out his handiwork and found it good. Still, I went home feeling like we'd only looked at the situation from our own point-of-view, a natural thing, but one that only gives us part of the story, limiting our pool of potential solutions to fortifications and traps, even if we didn't want to kill him.

So the following day, I shared what Pastor Judy and the police had said about the likely culprits. After talking about how we all sometimes do things we regret when we're angry, I asked the next logical question, "Why do you suppose those guys had to sleep behind the church?"

These are urban children. They know the answer. "Because they don't have a home."

"They don't have money."

"They don't have jobs."

"They don't even have toilets."

"They don't have food."

"That's why they have to be burglars."

The children knew all the answers. There was no lecturing required by me. I asked, "Do you think that's why the burglar broke our window?"

"He was trying to get food."

"We should give him food!"

"We could build him a house!"

The children already knew all the answers. We've scheduled a visit to a local food bank for our next field trip. We'll get on the bus with food in our hands and put it on the shelves. We'll keep talking about why people don't have enough food and about why they don't have a place to live and about why some feel they have no choice but to turn to a life of crime. We'll think some more about how to solve the problem to which we, as children, already know the answers, but too often forget as we grow up.

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