"We Don't Starve To Prepare For A Famine"

On Wednesday, I wrote about the most common non-education question people have had for me as an American when I've travelled outside the country. Perhaps the most common education-related question is some version of, "How do children from play-based preschools fare when they transition to traditional public schools?"

I also answer that question several times a year here at Woodland Park. People worry that their child, accustomed to the freedom to choose, to explore, to experiment, to play as her passions and interests guide her, will struggle when faced with the prospect of being told what to do while sitting at a desk, facing forward, taking tests, and filling out worksheets.

Of course, many of our families seek out "alternative schools," ones that offer a play-based, or inquiry-based, or project-based, or child-lead curriculum. We are lucky here in Seattle to be home to several such schools, including even a couple very good cooperative primary schools (here and here) where many of our former students matriculate. But the truth is that most families opt for our public schools.

One of the wonderful aspects of teaching in a cooperative school in which teachers form such close bonds with parents is that many of them stay in touch, sometimes for years after their child has moved on. Over my dozen years of sending children off to public schools, a couple of them have indeed struggled, but that seems pretty much par for the course; some children will always have problems with change whatever their educational background. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, our alumni children thrive in kindergarten and beyond, often returning to tell me that "kindergarten is better than preschool," which is exactly as it ought to be.

One thing working in our favor is that, around here at least, the kindergarten teachers, for the most part, do understand that they are dealing with 5-year-olds: they are unimpressed by early reading, they know young children need to move their bodies, and they do what they can to make school ready for the kids, rather than expecting the kids to be ready for school. I have been told by a number of public school kindergarten teachers that, at most, they hope their incoming students can write their own name, count to 10, and cut with scissors. I've never met a child without learning disabilities who doesn't have that sorted out by five, and most are well beyond this.

But more to the point, the experience of a play-based curriculum, one that honors children as complete human beings, fully capable of embracing their own education in their own way, produces children who are highly flexible and adaptable, who have a joyful approach toward school, who know intrinsically what they need in order to learn, and understand, therefore, how they ought to be treated in order to make that happen.

One of the few instances of Woodland Park grads who "hated" kindergarten were a boy and girl who wound up in class together. They told me, "Mrs. B-- is mean. She's always bossing us around and yelling at us. She doesn't know how to be a teacher." It didn't surprise me when this teacher was fired. I'm sure there were other complaints about her because the bar for dismissing a tenured teacher is, as it should be, quite high, but I'm incredibly proud of these kids who would not put up with what they saw as abusive, incompetent behavior. I just saw the boy yesterday and he's now a second grader who told me he "likes school," but says he could "love it" with just a few alterations which he gladly detailed for me on his fingers. Children who are introduced to school through a play-based education know what real learning looks like, and, I would assert, tend to know that they have both a right and responsibility, when faced with things that doesn't serve this, to try to affect change. They view teachers not as superiors, but as their educational partners, which is, after all, the proper stance of a student toward his teacher. Good teachers know this and thankfully most of the kindergarten teachers I've met around here are good teachers.

All I have, of course, are anecdotes that come from my informal "study" of how our kids do in the wider world of education, but from where I sit, they certainly do no worse, and often better, than kids who have already been drilled-and-killed in "academic" preschools. I used to think it was my job to get kids ready for a less-than-ideal educational future, but no longer. Play is the best way to get ready for anything life has to offer.

Yesterday, reader Dawn sent me an email, which read, in part:

Many years ago, I was wondering how to prepare kindergarteners who were accustomed to Project Approach for the transition to public school. I fretted that we may be doing harm by not getting them "ready" for this very different style of school . . . Sydney Guerwitz Clemons wisely told me: "We don't starve to prepare for a famine, Dawn. We fatten them up to the best of our ability and hope they survive."

Exactly. I will be using this line the next time someone asks me the question, which will probably be tomorrow.

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The Process Of Learning About Relationships

One of the aspects I like most about teaching in a cooperative preschool is that parents directly witness their child's processes: creating art, building with blocks, exploring sensory materials, assembling puzzles, and working with others. As a teacher, I don't need to be constantly "documenting" a student's work and reporting to parents about how and what their child is doing. As a parent I saw this as a primary advantage as well, not having to rely exclusively on the teacher for information about my child, but rather seeing with my own eyes, or the perspective of my fellow parent-teachers, how my child was doing in her process of getting along with the world.

Practicing working together is the most important thing we do in preschool.   This artwork won't be going home with the kids as a kind of "product report" on what they did today. In fact nothing of this will go home other than the experience gained from the process.

We usually talk about process v. product in relation to art, but in preschool it really applies to everything we do. I know that conscientious teachers strive to include process in their documentation and reporting on a child's work, attempting to show or demonstrate, for instance, not just that a child built an elaborate castle from blocks, but how it came about. The reality, however, of a teacher or two with a classroom full of children quite often means that what parents are left with are progress reports on product. This is especially true as report cards and 30 minute parent-teacher conferences come to dominate what is typically a one-way flow of information about the results of tests, homework, and grades.

I suppose I drove my daughter Josephine's kindergarten teacher a little crazy at times in the way I almost dismissed her official reports, preferring frequent, casual hallway conversations about how, not what, she was doing. In fact, when I sat down for parent-teacher conferences, I always let the teachers know that I was far more interested in discussing how she was getting along with her classmates than anything to do with grades. After all, social skills have far more to do with success in life than do academic ones, and that's information that awfully hard to package up into a report.

Some of the kids negotiate a process that involves "covering all the white parts."

It continues to be incredibly valuable to me as a parent, even as Josephine is now a young woman, to have been an eye-witness to her preschool trials and struggles, especially in the area of exploring relationships. As any psychologist will tell you, this is where you need to go for therapy to work, and many of our issues in adult relationships can be traced right back to those earliest ones. I can't tell you how often, over the years, that I've found myself reminding Josephine of events and friendships from our cooperative preschool days as we've discussed her current social challenges.

Some teams are find themselves more interested in the patterns they can make together with the tracks made by the golf balls as they roll through the paint.

It might sound odd at first, but I often discourage parent-teachers from reading books (or at least, reading book after book) to kids during class. Of course, I have nothing against books, but our classroom time is relatively short and sitting on a lap, in a corner, listening to a story tends to be a rather isolating activity, even if you're sitting in a cluster of other kids. Plus, I know that the kids I teach are being read to at home, so there isn't that concern. As I see it, the primary reason we're at school in the first place is to practice our relationship skills, to experiment with ourselves amidst the other people: that is something one really can't do at home, or at least not nearly as well as we can at school where the playmates aren't hand selected, where there are dozens of individual agendas and personalities to be accommodated, where one must constantly strive to find one's place, to learn to assert oneself, and to know when and how to join right in. 

While for others, they are more interested in the contact they make with their friends across the way, all part of the process of learning to get along with the other people.

The only way to learn these things is to practice, which is a the sort of lifelong process in which most of us find ourselves engaged, both socially and in our jobs. This is why process is always more important than product, and process is something best understood with one's own eyes.

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Making A Mess

We've always painted at our easels on the last day of school. I've assumed it was because we always start our school year with easel painting and the two sessions served as symbolic bookends, or maybe a framing story, for the year, something for me to know. This year, however, something popped from my mouth as I talked to the parent of a child ready to move on to kindergarten, something I'd not thought about before, or perhaps that I'd simply avoided thinking about it: "Unless you do it at home, this might be the last time she sees easels painting."

The words, as I heard myself say them, hit me like a physical weight. I stood there watching her paint the arcs of a rainbow. There is painting in kindergarten, of course. My daughter Josephine brought home paintings she'd made in her twice weekly session with her school's art specialist. In fact, she produced more paintings during her kindergarten year, I think, than she had the previous year in preschool. That's because they made all the kids go to the art room together and painting, usually on a theme, or experimenting with a technique, was the only choice. In her preschool, like in our preschool, the kids only painted if they were moved to paint, and when given a choice it was usually dramatic play for Josephine.

Next fall when I run into my former students, the ones not painting at easels in kindergarten, most of them will enthuse about how much they love their new school, about their new teacher, about their new friends or playground or lunchroom. Sometimes they come back to the preschool for a visit and I'll ask them, "Does this place look as big as you remember it?" and they'll usually answer, "No, Teacher Tom, it seems really small." And they might even affect a bit of the too-cool-for-school attitude, but it will only last until they get their hands in the sensory table, their feet in the sandpit, or their fingers around a paint brush.

During our last week of school we explored a technique I learned from Josephine's elementary school art teacher. The idea was to experiment with the solubility of oil pastels by first drawing something, then dipping cotton balls in baby oil which you then use to blend and smear your colors around the paper. We've been doing this at Woodland Park for awhile now. Our finished paintings never look anything like the ones that hung gallery-style in the hallway of my daughter's school. I'd asked the art teacher about the technique because the results had been so striking, and yes, we always manage to produce one or two that achieve the ghostly translucence of those kindergarten paintings, but most turn out looking like oily chicken scratches. No, our baby oil-pastel paintings are definitely about the process, one that usually involves the excessive use of oil, slippery surfaces, slippery skin, and the overwhelming scent of an infant's nursery, an odor that Calliope and Henry's mom Megan told me "is not a selling point" of the activity.

In other words, what we do, in the language of most kindergarten art teachers, is "make a mess." If we make "paintings" that's often just what we've agreed to call whatever's leftover when the kids are done. I've sometimes sent the paper towels used for "clean up" home with the kids because that's all that remained of their exploration.

I really don't mean this as a criticism, but the whole idea of "making a mess" as something to avoid becomes a more prominent part in children's school lives as they move away from our preschool. For some children, this is a huge loss, while for others, the ones who have always been averse to getting messy, like my own daughter, it might seem like it's not such a big deal. I would assert, however, that it impoverishes education for everyone. I mean if nothing else, there's a lot to be learned from watching others make a mess, or from having to summon up the courage to give something that looks fun a go. Every now and then a parent will suggest that I have prejudices about kids who don't like to get messy. I don't think that's true, but even if it is, certainly I serve as a kind of counterbalance to the majority of adults in a child's life who have prejudices about kids who like getting messy.

Making a mess means cleaning up. Listen, I get that. I just spent most of last Saturday with a team of parents cleaning up our outdoor classroom. A couple parents spent two hours just picking garbage (bits of paper, broken toys, snarls of twine, etc.) from the wood chips, a project that could have gone on for hours longer. I've always said that an ideal preschool classroom would be one with a large drain in the middle of the floor and access to a high pressure hose nozzle. I understand that as a teacher in a cooperative, I'm blessed with plenty of adults who can help with the messes we make: I'm sure I would have a different attitude if I, on a day-to-day basis, was solely responsible for dealing with it. 

When Josephine was in kindergarten her teacher Janet started asking me to "bring in" projects for the kids. For instance, she wanted me to temporarily install the cast iron water pump on the playground. The kids, of course, got wet and muddy. As we helped towel them off, I said to Janet, "You should permanently install a pump," to which she replied, "I'd love to, but the parents would complain about the kids coming home messy."

"Aren't they going to complain about today?"

She laughed, "Yes, but today I can blame you," and she did.

I know a lot of schools have eliminated sandpits because they don't like how much of it winds up on the floors and in the carpets. It's a legitimate concern. When we went to move our new rug earlier this year in order to wax the linoleum floors underneath, it was so heavy with sand despite being vacuumed twice a day, that it had to be disassembled, carpet tile by carpet tile, beaten clean, then reassembled.

So yes, I understand the ethic of avoiding messes in elementary school, even while I can bemoan what is lost when we defer to this adult agenda. I mean, the kids don't care if there are bits of paper mixed in with the wood chips.

But I worry that it's not just "dirty" messes we start to avoid. Another thing kindergarteners won't see in school are glue guns or homemade ladders or concrete slides. We also have to avoid the "mess" of everyday bumps and bruises, the kinds that make us cry and bleed and from which we learn so much about ourselves and about risk-taking.

I worry that this ethic of not making messes spills over to include social, emotional, and political messes as well, the kinds that make us cry and rave and from which we likewise learn so much.

It was a joy to watch the youngest kids, happily painting themselves up to the elbows, making a canvas of their own bodies, exploring, learning, making a mess, knowing that it will be two or more years before they will have to give it up. It was a crushingly sad to watch the oldest kids, industriously working together with the cast iron water pump and shovels, filling their shoes and pant cuffs and hair with sand, making a mess, not knowing that, for some of them at least, this will be the last time for school to be like this.

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Who We Are Becoming

Over the past several weeks, I've been meeting one-on-one with many of the parents preparing to send their kids off to kindergarten next year. One after another, they've been telling me how good they're feeling about their child, how the things that worried them nine months ago no longer seem to apply. What a wonderful thing to have so many parents feeling this way about their children. I've been tempted to warn them that it's just a lull, that there are new concerns right around the corner, but then I stop myself here on the cusp of summer, knowing that they, like everyone, will figure it out on their own. It got me thinking about this post from last May.

I try to be as Zen as the next guy, you know, setting aside those "wasted" emotions like guilt and worry, those ravenous obsessions that grow to eat up the present if you'll let them. They're horrible party guests, alright, with a tendency to hang around long after their value as goads to improvement or precaution has passed.

I find guilt an easier one to wrangle out of my day-to-day life. I've had lots of practice in my half century on the planet with apologizing, making amends, and committing myself to being a better me going forward, which is all anyone can ever do. I've been a parent long enough now to know that those things about which I feel the sharpest blade of guilt, will not only be forgiven, but forgotten in the long love story that is being a father.

Ah, but guilt comes out of the past, a place already behind us, viewable through that famous 20/20 hindsight and therefore, for me at least, easier to package up and put away. Worry is about the unknowable future, the place we prepare for with, at best, educated guesses. It's harder to keep worry in its place. And as a parent, the moment you put one set of worries behind you, there is another set to keep you up at night.

As a preschool teacher I talk with a lot of parents about their worries. Almost every time I'm pulled aside it's to discuss hitting or biting or shyness or fearfulness or aggressiveness or passiveness or whatever, present tense attitudes or behaviors about which that parent is concerned. Of course, they're always concerned about "right now," about teaching their child to not hurt another or to make more friends, but it doesn't take much digging to know that the real worry is of a future bully or moody loner. This is the bud we hope to nip.

I felt those same feelings too. I worried about those same things too. I still worry about them, although not as much these days as I'm really beginning to see the woman my teenaged child is becoming. No, now I worry about the well-known hazards of the age (drinking, sex, cars, guns) but I'm here to tell you that the person she is today could have easily been predicted a decade ago if my worries had only allowed me to see it.

Parents don't always find comfort in the assurance, "It's just a phase," I know. And perhaps that particular sentence ought to be retired, but for most of the kids, most of the time, it is just a phase, an important one from which your child is learning what he needs to learn to move beyond it or through it or to make peace with it. I know it's easy for me, not being a parent of these children, but rather just being an attentive guy who has stood in one place for a long time, touching and being touched by hundreds of families as they pass my way, to answer "I'm not worried," but it's also true.

The biting will stop. The hitting will fade away. The voiceless will find their voice. The rough will learn gentleness. The fearful will find courage. Your child will move on to the next developmental stage, be diagnosed, and learn to love and be loved. That is all, inevitably, in the future.

Who we are never matters nearly as much as who we are becoming. More often than not, that's how I have to answer parents when they come to me with their worries, "It's just a phase."

My wife and I have a joke we tell one another when the pressures of life are upon us: "This is the critical phase." It's always true; both in that it's critical and that it's a phase.  It makes us grin because we know when we look back, we'll see that it really was a phase, while the critical part will remain immediately ahead of us, there just itching to be worried about.

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A Kindergarten Readiness Check List

A couple nights ago, our parent education topic was "kindergarten readiness." Although there are some schools, sadly, that expect 5-year-olds to already possess certain literacy and math skills, most are more concerned with self-help skills like zipping up jackets, putting on shoes, and using the toilet, as well as knowing vital information like their own last names, their parent’s first names, their addresses and phone numbers.  I don’t currently teach most of these things, at least not consciously, although I did teach these skills as a parent. I'm inspired to put a little more emphasis on those things, but have also found myself thinking about what "kindergarten readiness" skills I am trying to teach.

The ability to function effectively in a group

Most of my kids are heading off to Seattle Public School kindergartens, which means that they'll potentially be in classes of 20 or more, with a teacher and an assistant of some kind. If Woodland Park kids are going to thrive, it will help to have a little experience with navigating a class of that size. That’s one of the reasons I like larger classes in the context of a cooperative preschool. My ideal class sizes are 20 plus. This might sound outrageously large, and it would be in a traditional preschool, but because of our cooperative model we maintain child:adult ratios of between 4:1 and 2:1 depending on age, whatever our class size. 

Focus

Children who can focus on a single activity, even one in which they might not at first be interested or with which they struggle, for 20-30 minute stretches will be ready for the kind of curriculum that naturally emerges from the 10+:1 child-adult ratios found in kindergarten. As a teacher, when you alone are responsible for so many kids, you need them to have the capacity to engage in activities – even “challenging” ones – without a ton of adult guidance or persuasion. We begin practicing this skill with circle time, stretching the kids out as they get older. For our Pre-3 class, this might mean 20-25 minutes by the end of the year. As I wrote a few days ago, our 5's class has already demonstrated an ability to stay focused, as a group, for up to 45 minutes!

Public speaking

I like Woodland Park kids to be confident in front of an audience, and its a skill we concentrate on with the 4 and 5 year olds, making sure each of them has a turn in front of the class at least once a week. Public speaking is like a muscle: exercise it, or it will whither. It doesn’t have to be a nerve-wracking experience. Raising hands is the entry level version of public speaking, but during their Pre-K and 5's years they find themselves in front of the room during their weekly “sharing time” (show and tell) as well as during “journals” (I read their journal entries to the class). By the time they “graduate” they will have had opportunities to sit in the “birthday throne” to talk about their lives, and an unlimited number of opportunities to present their stories from the front of the room.

American’s consistently report “public speaking” as among their greatest fears, often ahead of “death.” Given how important that skill is, and how pervasive the fear, it only makes sense to work on it at a young age.

Fairness

Identifying and engaging the basic concept of fairness is an important social skill that we actively teach at Woodland Park. Children who expect to be treated fairly and who seek to treat others fairly, will not only tend to attract more friends and grow up to be better citizens, but they will also be better equipped for standing up to bullying.

Question authority

I want our kids to have a strong sense of what they know and to have the confidence to question adults when they are being told things that don’t fit their reality. The children at Woodland Park learn early that Teacher Tom often says things that are flat out wrong and it’s their job to set him right. When I say that I want them to question authority I don’t mean it in a defiant sense, but rather in the sense of our best educational traditions.

“Academic” skills

I’ve spoken to a number of kindergarten teachers, from both public and private schools over the years about what they’re looking for as far as “academic” skills. They are not expecting the children to be reading, nor are then expecting them to be familiar with mathematical algorithms. It’s enough that they know the alphabet, can write their own names, count to 10, and be able to cut on a line with scissors. I’ve never gone out of my way to teach any of those skills, but we’ve never sent a child off to kindergarten who hadn’t mastered them.

There’s a much longer "list" of things I hope to teach children, but these are sort of the nuts and bolts essentials, I think. A child well-grounded in these is prepared for kindergarten. Ideally, however, as my educational ally Deborah Stewart at Teach Preschool points out:

 . . . it is the job of our schools to get ready for their incoming kindergarteners, not the kids’ job to get ready for kindergarten. This is because kids come in such a wide range of skills and developmental needs.

But even still, we want to help children be prepared to be successful as they move ahead in school. The most important thing that I think Pre-K teachers can do is keep school fun and help their students love to learn. Encourage their curiosity, interest to discover and explore, and creativity. We want them to love learning and have a desire to learn more.

Ultimately, that's the kind of kid who will thrive in kindergarten and beyond.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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The Act Of Us Coming Together

We might as well not come to school at all unless at least one of the highest goals is to practice doing things together. If that isn't what school is for, then we could just leave kids to learn in their own bedrooms, backyards, and from the isolation of computers and apps.

I always wonder about all my classes at the start of the school year: what will it be that brings them together? I've done this job for awhile, so I can be confident that it will happen, at least with the 2, 3, and younger 4-year-olds whom I've taught now for a decade and more. It will happen and often I can even "manufacture" some things around which I know their time together will revolve. 

I've had these and other questions about our new 5's class. It's a new thing to all of us this year. Some of these children are already in kindergarten, joining us after a morning in public school; some could be, just barely according to the calendar, but are taking a year with us first; others would be in preschool in any event, but have chosen us, perhaps for the challenge or the afternoon class time. All last year, I referred to this new school to which we were giving birth as a "transitional kindergarten," but for whatever reason I've not been using the term since summer began and we knew for certain the class was a go.

I know what kindergartens look like, at least in "traditional" schools, I've seen them, been in them, watched children lean across their desks to touch their noses to worksheets. I know what children this age look like when they're in school, but what is happening at Woodland Park this year is going to be different than that.

We don't have desks and won't have work sheets and there is no one giving us a list of things children ought to know and by when. It's going to look more like the kindergarten I remember as a boy than the ones I see today: the way they looked before someone pushed a first grade curriculum down into them, shortening childhood by a year.

There might be some who would say that we're irresponsible, going forward with this idea for which there really is no idea, other than old-timey memories and the ideas that will emerge from the act of us coming together. I prefer to label what we are doing as "an experiment," which is, after all what every human endeavor is until it has been done before: a trail and error experiment. The kind of thousand step experiment that leads to the invention of the light bulb. This really is, at bottom, what every class I've ever taught has been. That is the best of us, gathering 'round and asking, "What if?" then working together to answer that question. 

What will bring this 5's class together?

For this first week it has been all about water and sand as our Seattle summer, like last year, has arrived full-blown in September: hot days, cool nights and lots of sun. Someone is always up there pumping the cast iron pump. Our cistern holds 10 gallons. After this week, it's become clear that it's time to trade that out for the 30 gallon model, a project I hope to complete, with the 5's class, this week.

It's been a wonder to watch as nearly all of them are drawn up there to the top of the sand pit with shovels and buckets and gutters, shouting out to these people they've just met, "More water!" and "Pump faster!" I'm accustomed to being busy during the beginning of the year, helping children work their way through conflicts, wiping tears over turn-taking, and that's probably still coming, but so far there's not been much for me to do as they dig canals, strategize their next moves, test what will and won't wend its way through these manmade passages. On the very first day of class, they had the water flowing all the way down to the row boat: the only times that's ever happened before has been with a lot of adult assistance.

It's caught me off guard to be honest, that this is where they've converged to begin forming their friendships, their partnerships, their alliances. I had all kinds of other plans. We were going to build this together, play that game, engage in these art projects, but it's been the sand and water and blue skies that have made them familiars in the matter of days.

We did take a break from the sandpit on Friday to learn how to vote. The very first thing we did was decide, together, that we want to perform a play.

(This is the first year of our 5's class. If you have a 4-5 year old, live in Seattle, or know someone who does, we still have a few spots available. Contact woodlandpark5s@gmail.com to set up a tour.)

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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