How We Run Our Stations

I often say both to myself as well as aloud, "I don't know how they do it." I'm referring, of course, to all those teachers out there who don't work in cooperative preschools, and especially those with a play-based classroom that operates around the idea of "stations" or "centers."

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, be assured that I had no idea either until the first time I actually set foot in such a school. The set-up made such immediate sense to me, however, that I promptly enrolled my daughter for the following year. I don't know what I expected school to look like for two-year-olds, but the moment I saw how the Latona Pre-3's Cooperative Preschool classroom worked, a room featuring a half dozen stations -- blocks, sensory table, art, table toys, dramatic play, library -- with which the children were able to freely interact, or not, I knew we'd found our home.

Back in April, I wrote more philosophically about this classroom approach, but a reader asked me recently for tips of the "nuts and bolts" variety, especially when it comes to being the adult responsible for guiding or facilitating the "free play" without taking it over and, well, rendering it not so free. I should mention that I'm writing primarily about our indoor stations here, but all the same principles apply to our outdoor stations as well.

Since we're a cooperative, I have the benefit of anywhere from 5-12 assistant teachers, parent-teachers, in the classroom with me on any given day, depending on the age of the kids and the status of maternity leaves. Each of these assistant teachers, then, are assigned specific roles within the classroom on a rotating basis, most of which involve facilitating one of our stations, which I've prepared in advance. As our parent-teachers arrive, I try to give each one a quick briefing about how I imagine the children will choose to engage with the activities, a head's up about any typical behaviors for which to be on the lookout, and a tip or two about how they might want to extend the play should things either get extra exciting or lose momentum. I then try to always finish my instructions with a reminder to, above all else, "Let the kids make it their own."

For many parent-teachers, that's the hardest part: getting out of the way, dropping an adult agenda or fixed idea about how things ought to go. For instance, we all think we know what's going on when we find easels, paper, paint, brushes, and a bowl of fruit on the table. Of course, we're working on "still life" paintings, and that invitation is indeed implied in this particular collection of materials, although it is by no means the only invitation there. This is also an invitation to paint the fruit itself, to use the fruit to apply the paint to paper, to finger paint, to mix colors; it is an invitation to make art, but also to engage in a sensory exploration, scientific experiments, storytelling, or socializing. When we make the mistake of saying, "Oh look! Today we're painting pictures of fruit!" we are, in effect, withdrawing all those other invitations. No, instead I encourage our parent-teachers, if they must say something, to simply list the materials they see before them, giving them names, but not necessarily purposes, and just so long as the children do not endanger, molest, or otherwise inflict themselves on others, they are free to accept any and all invitations that appeal to their curiosity.

This doesn't mean that the teachers role, then, ought to be limited to merely standing back, keeping things tidy, the children safe, and the materials handy, although some of our parent-teachers chose to do it like that, and it's a perfectly fine way to facilitate the play. Some of us, however, are there to play with the kids. Naturally, we need to guard against taking over the play, but there is often a lot to be gained from a teacher who role models active, creative engagement. I like to narrate my own thought process as I perform my own experiments: "I wonder what will happen when I put this block here," "The rice is flowing through the top part of the funnel and coming out of this little hole -- if I put my finger here, it stops," "I'm putting all the red ones together." Usually, my goal is to get things going before stepping away, although many parent-teachers are quite skilled at continuing to play with the children, almost in the role of a slightly older, wiser playmate, not commanding the action, not yanking them out of their flow with questions, but rather being one of the features of the activity.

Others of us approach the task in a more hand's off, yet still fully engaged manner, carefully observing the children, then finding ways to assist or support them in accomplishing or discovering what they seem to be striving to accomplish or discover, often simply by engaging in what's sometimes referred to as "sportscasting" or narrating what you see unfolding before you: "Sally is making holes in the play dough with her thumb," "You are turning that puzzle piece around and around to see if it fits," "I see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 bears in your box." I often find these parents cheek-to-cheek with children, wondering and puzzling together.

Sometimes a parent-teacher finds herself all alone at her station either due to the natural ebb and flow of free play or because the invitation is simply not enticing enough on this particular day. The temptation, often, is to seek to liven things up, perhaps by adding bells and whistles or by becoming more overt in re-issuing said invitation, and that's all well and good. Others, however, recognize that they are now the proprietors of a calm, quiet oasis, a place for a child or two to take a break from the action, a valuable thing sometimes in a bustling place like ours.

There are times, however, when this ebb and flow are anticipated parts of an activity. For example, when we play with ice in the sensory table, there is usually an initial surge, then as fingers grow numb, so does the enthusiasm. That's the moment when the parent-teacher will introduce our box of gloves. As the interest in that dies down, we break out the rock salt to sprinkle on the ice, an activity that accelerates the melting process. As the salt burrows holes in the ice we bring out the pipettes and liquid water color that can then inject into the holes, filling the ice with ribbons of color. As our play time grows short, our sensory table has become a pool of colored liquid, rainbow icebergs, and undissolved rock salt, having passed through, along with the kids, a wide variety of stages and phases.

Most of our stations are of the open-ended variety, although every now and then we'll take on a project with a goal. For instance, last week our workbench station was engaged all week in assembling our new outdoor furniture, which involved following instructions, puzzling things together, and using Allen wrenches to tighten lots of screws. In that case, my instruction to the parent-teacher was, "Just start building the stuff and as kids drop by to see what's going on, include them." I often think of these kinds of stations the way I think of parents including their children in preparing dinner or working on the car out in the garage: real participation in real projects.

I suppose the way non-cooperative teachers handle all this is to either offer fewer stations at any given time or to let some of them sort of "run" themselves, and I'm sure that works out just fine, but I find I've become really quite reliant upon having all those extra adults in the room with me, working to make their station the best it can be. Most of all, I think, I enjoy how these stations, these invitations to play, so often take on part of the personality of the parent-teacher involved. We often leave many of our stations the same for more than a single day. For instance I'll set up the same collection of blocks and toys from one day to the next, or the sensory table will contain coffee beans all week, or we'll continue working on the same glue collage day-after-day. But that hardly means they are the same activities. For one thing, the children have the opportunity to continue building upon what they learned the day before, but an inevitable part of the difference comes from what the parent-teacher brings to their role as facilitator and guide, because there are as many ways to do that as there are teachers.

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Kids In The House: Play-Based Preschool Curriculum

I was once told that if you have something important to say to a busy person, the first step is to practice getting your main points across in two minutes or less. That way, the theory goes, if you happen to find yourself, say, in an elevator with the President, you won't waste the opportunity stumbling over your words. And if you're really good, the President will then reply, "Tell me more."

Anyway, that was sort of the mission when I traveled to Santa Monica to make a series of 18 short parenting videos for Kids In The House. And even while I doubt I'll ever find myself alone on an elevator with the President, I found it an excellent exercise to try to talk about big topics in a limited time-frame without it coming out as word salad.

A huge part of this blog is about the whys and wherefores of a play-based curriculum, so I know I can go long on the topic. Embedded below is my attempt at an elevator ride speech on how a play-based curriculum works.

And while you could hardly throw a rock at your computer screen (although I wouldn't recommend it) without hitting a post here that addresses at least some aspect of a play-based curriculum, if you're interested in the long-form version, you might want to check out some of these posts:

Teaching A Play-Based Curriculum
How A Play-Based Curriculum Works
I Just Need To Play With Them
How An Emergent Curriculum Works: Hardwired Into Our DNA (first of a 5 parter)
Choosing The Way That Is Hard
Why We Laugh When We Play
Let's Define Play
Why I Teach The Way I Do (This is the really long version that I would hope the President would read after hearing the elevator pitch.)

And if you liked the video, you can find not only the rest of my videos (search for "Tom Hobson"), but also some 8000 more two minute parenting videos at Kids In The House.

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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Learning To Garden With Young Children

When my wife and I purchased our first house, we wound up with a gorgeous lawn, beautiful shrubbery, fantastic trees and many beds for growing annuals. I almost immediately killed the lawn, my first of many. I don't think I did too much damage to the established plants and trees, but after that first year, the beds were largely just an inadvertent science experiment in which various kinds of weeds battled it out for supremacy, but that initial summer we had a flower garden for the ages.

Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but it was my one shining example of gardening success. It was mostly petunias, but in the classic "granny garden" ethic in which I was raised, there were cosmos and daisies and geraniums and lobelia and marigolds and poppies and a little bit of just about everything else that grows here in the Pacific Northwest. I was out there every single day from early Spring through early Fall, watering, weeding, fertilizing, deadheading, and just generally sitting there with my shoes off in the increasingly spotty grass just watching it grow. I learned then, that this is the secret to a successful garden: daily attention.

By the following Spring the newness had begun to wear off. I started like a ball-o-fire, but soon found myself resenting the flower bed as much as I had grown to resent the never-ending obligations of mowing, pruning, and raking. But at least I'd learned what it takes, even if it turned out to not be the hobby for me.

Like it or not, small schools like ours do tend to take on the strengths and weaknesses of the teacher, especially if that teacher has been there for a long time. Woodland Park has alway had a garden, but for most of my tenure that has meant a handful of plants that thrive on neglect and loads of empty beds that were just perfect for mixing up some mud. When we got serious about the outdoor part of our program 5 years ago, our community reclaimed our old garden space, spruced it up, and declared "gardening" to be part of our curriculum. We always have a number of avid gardeners within our parent community, folks who know what they're doing, and since I'm not one of those, we've relied on the time and energy of those people for whatever gardening success we've had.

And while I wouldn't call our preschool gardening a failure, despite good intentions and often yeoman-like efforts, it has never really thrived, at least not as a part of the curriculum. For that, I blame myself. No matter how many willing hands I have to help me, it's my job to "hold the vision," and since my experience in gardening is limited, my vision tends to be fairly limited as well. It probably hasn't helped that we've moved the entire garden, plants and all, three times during those five years: first from the old space to the new, then two years ago from a less than ideal spot to a sunnier spot.

But something has happened this year. For one thing, we had a couple of very dedicated gardener parents put their focus on things, digging-in during the early Spring to really fill those beds with a variety of interesting, mostly edible plants, usually working with small teams of children. To a certain degree, this has happened every year, but perhaps the most important thing they've done is to actually keep track of what we've planted and where. And as summer approaches, our garden is turning out to be the place to be. We haven't harvested much food so far, just some snap peas, but we can see things coming: onions, raspberries, strawberries, lettuces and cabbages. Our herbs are bursting out of their beds and our snap pea vines are starting to climb charmingly over the child-sized archway built for the purpose.

Gardening with young children can be a harrowing experience. All it takes is one child, off the radar for a few minutes, to essentially upend all of your hard work. All it takes is one child not understanding the designation between garden bed and pathway. But over the years, my greatest frustrations with gardening and young children is simply that for most of our school year, there isn't much going on out there, and just as things really get going, we break for the Summer, leaving our herbage to an ever-changing group of kids who are only there three days a week. The lessons of the garden, it seemed to me, were those of life cycles, of patience, of consistency, and of gentleness, but our school schedule really isn't set up for that. But this Summer I'm starting to see it differently. As the early Spring work of our gardening parents literally bears fruit, I'm beginning to understand the importance of having a garden in our midst.

It's not that we have to bear witness to every stage in the lifecycle of our garden, from sprout to seed, because that is happening all the time, all around us, at homes, in parks, in the woods, and in our school. No, the importance of our garden is to spend time there, puttering around, dropping to our knees and simply being with the plants.

Yes, our plants are experiencing a kind of drought-flood cycle right now as the kids water the diddly-o-dandy out of them for our three days on, leaving it to go dry during the subsequent four days. It's good we have well-drained soil in there. Yes, we've tried sprouting our own wheat grass seeds, but that was done in peat pots beside the garden, a place for experimentation, whereas the garden itself is more for exploration. As I mentioned, we have harvested a few snap peas and a couple carrots that wintered over, and we're keeping an eye on our berries, but most of our gardening has been done with our eyes, not our hands. We've played with ladybugs in the garden, releasing them one at a time from the bag of 1,500 we purchased from a nursery. And yesterday, we used acrylic paint pens to decorate the wood of the raised beds, the terra cotta pots, and various rocks and stones; not gardening exactly, but being in the garden, breathing the garden, being with the garden.

That was the best part, after all, of my one successful gardening cycle, sitting there in the grass watching the flowers grow. I'm starting to understand that this is what gardening with young children is all about.

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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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.

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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A Necessity For Thriving In The Contemporary World

During my first year teaching 2-year-olds, I had a boy that probably had some sort of mild sensory integration issues. I was not experienced enough to recognize it, but it did result in him spending large chunks of his days hanging out under our loft, complaining to one of his parent-teacher buddies that he was planning to "break the whole school." I've written about Henry before and how we managed to calm him with caution cones, but there was a time, his mother later confessed to me, when she had considered switching schools, worried that Woodland Park was just a bit too rowdy for him. And we can be loud and rambunctious indoors and out.

When Henry headed off to kindergarten his mother told me about dropping him off, how she had anticipated at least a little first day jitters, but instead he just plunged right in to the big school with barely a wave goodbye. She said, "I'm so glad we stuck it out at Woodland Park. He was so ready for the craziness of 25 kids and one teacher."

And that's where most of the children are heading when they leave Woodland Park, into our terrific local public schools, some of which, however, have classes with as many as 30 students. Not ideal, of course, but that's today's reality. I'm glad we're sending kids like Henry off with the confidence and skills they need to handle it, if only because they have learned to thrive within a little cacophony.

Last week was one of our noisier indoor weeks. I'd set up our real traffic light, the one I borrowed from my father 10 years ago and never returned. We used our little push bikes as vehicles, created a tight road grid, and around and around and around we drove, complete with appropriate traffic sounds, including the occasional flare-up between drivers. It's really a big, ongoing negotiation, not entirely unlike regular urban driving.

When we have one of these kinds of set ups in the room, I like to pair it with other activities that lend themselves to concentration. One of our favorites is this Montessori-inspired art exploration in which we use liquid watercolor, pipettes, paper towels and some of those little suction-cup soap holders. Now, no one is telling the kids they must carefully direct one drop of paint into each of the suction cups, then place a paper towel on top to absorb a slow-motion tie-dye explosion, but most of them do, and some of them do it over and over, experimenting with their own coordination, the combinations of colors, and the characteristics of liquid.

It's not an easy thing, requiring a steady hand, focus, and patience, especially if you have a pattern in mind. It was impressive, I think, how capable the kids are by this time in the school year to block out the distractions and get to their self-selected work.

There were several kids who had been getting a little ramped up in traffic, even acting out upon their "road rage," who I saw remove themselves seamlessly from the fray, moving to the art table next door, where they self-calmed by going deeply into this tiny world of painting one drop at a time. I know many adults who do the same thing after a long, trying, end-of-the-day commute by pouring themselves a cocktail. This is healthier and much cheaper.

I wish I could keep them in our little progressive school bubble forever, but ultimately, sooner or later, what we're preparing them for is the real world with large classes and traffic jams. Being able to get about our work of living in spite of that is a necessity if we are going to thrive in the contemporary world.

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 Magnificence Of Play

I can't imagine anyone thinks more or more deeply about sensory tables than Tom Bedard over at Sand and Water Tables. I especially love the right hand column of his blog where he lists his eight "Axioms of Sensorimotor Play." Not only do these axioms have the virtue of making me chuckle because they verify my own experience, but taken in aggregate they stipulate that if allowed to play freely and given enough time, children will explore every possible nook, cranny, up, down, laugh, and tear. This is the magnificence of play: no stone is ever left unturned.

Recently, Tom posted about creating levels within his sand table using peg board, and since among the many things I'm curating in the storage room is a large sheet of peg board left over from another project, I thought we should give it a go. For better or worse, our peg board had become a bit warped from being leaned against a wall for a couple years, so I wasn't able to exactly re-create Tom's set up, so I just winged it, duct taping one larger sheet to one side of our magnificent sensory table, then creating lots of smaller mobile platforms from scraps and wooden chopsticks.

We have a massive amount of sand, but it was all the way outside in our sand pit and I had a couple large bins of flax seed within arm's reach, so I went with that. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but a storage room full of oddball loose parts coupled with a bit of laziness is certainly its father.

As the children across all three of our classes, aged 2-6 played with this set up over the week, I saw each of Tom's axioms in action as the children fully explored every level, both over and under, including the floor. They filled and emptied every scoop and container, repeatedly. They discovered that the chopstick supported platforms could be moved around. They discovered they could be taken apart. They discovered they could be put back together. They discovered that the peg board scraps themselves could be used to move the flax seed around.

I've been having a number of incredible discussions about play while here in Athens for my talk on Friday. In one of them we discussed a study in which researchers had invented a toy that had a number of features, both obvious and hidden. With one group of children, the adults demonstrated a handful of the features (e.g., push this button, turn this dial), then handed it over to the children. The children quickly explored each of those features, then were finished. The key element of this toy, however, was that there another dozen features to be discovered that had not been demonstrated. The second group of children were simply given the toy with no demonstration. This group of children played with the toy until they had discovered all of the features. (UPDATE: Thanks to readers, I've learned that the toy I'm writing about here only had 4 functions and one was demonstrated, but the results were as I've described -- the children who received no demonstration of the toy were far more likely to discover the other three functions, and played longer, than those who received a demonstration. Here's a link. Another link is provided by Alec of Child's Play Music in the comments.)

As I watched the children play with the flax seed and pegboard levels, I was in awe of their inventiveness, curiosity and motivation. Some of them spent hours there during the week, asking and answering their own questions, working at their own pace, figuring out this small corner of the world, which is really just a model of the larger world in which we all live.

This is the magnificence of play.

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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