The Kindergarten Classroom

The kindergarten classroom is outfitted for all types of pursuits. There are double easels and paints for creating large works. Markers, crayons, scissors, staplers, and tape are available whenever children wish to use them. A special area with child-sized kitchen furnishings and dishes, dolls and dress up clothing offers a space for dramatic play. Sometimes this housekeeping area will turn into another destination for make-believe-a bank, grocery store, post office, restaurant, ice cream store, etc. There are tables set up elsewhere in the room for play and work with materials such as play dough, clay, pegs, puzzles, beads to string, a small doll house and life experience replicas (little gas station, boats, etc). Another area is dedicated to unit blocks which are designed to complement one another so that there is mathematical and architectural logic to the block work created in that area. There is a listening center where children can listen to books on tape as well as a class library. Additionally, the children may play with equipment set out in the outdoor covered area adjacent to the classroom. These are the basic components of the room.

There are other materials, too, less concrete. The day is infused with music. At times, the children request music and will dance spontaneously. We sing every morning and afternoon; we listen to music when we draw in journals and as we rest after lunch. We listen to poems and always devote time to listening to a chapter or two from a children's novel. There is also time for reading from lots and lots of picture books.

Finally, there is our wonderful outdoor space equipped with a small orchard full of fruit trees and accompanying spiders, birds, and other life. There is a woodworking area, a sandbox, forts to climb up to, ramps to ride down on, scooters and trikes to ride down them on, and swings to swing on.

The Kindergarten Day

The first part of the morning is what we refer to as Activity Time. The children choose an area they would most like to work in as they arrive. The teacher monitors the areas to provide enough materials to work with and helps with the flow of the centers so they are not crowded. It is at this time that the teacher is aware of individual interests and passions, that she is able to help with social awareness, and can take some time aside to speak with children individually or in small groups. The room is free flowing with lots of opportunities. Children are encouraged to move from block area to easel to play dough as they wish. However, the movement is harmonious, and not allowed to become disorganized. The setting up of the room itself contributes much to the natural balance of the classroom. At 9:30 we stop to clean up the room. The children are wonderful about cleaning the room; this is an important part of the day. Maintaining order and putting things away carefully assures that the child will know where to find them again and affords a sense of pride and mutual responsibility for our shared environment.

Morning Meeting begins around 9:35; we start with a discussion about the date, weather and how many days we have been in school. At 9:45 we gather at the tables to enjoy a snack, one brought from home by a parent to share with the whole class. Parents provide morning snacks on a weekly basis. This allows the children to experience the same foods together. It is a time for conversation and part of our coming together after our active morning work.

By 10:00 we are heading outside to play. We ask parents to dress children in warm and comfortable clothing. Rain does not often prevent us from going outside, so sturdy boots and water repellant coats are necessary.

Back inside at 10:30, we gather together for a "theme circle," based on a particular area of study. The teacher gathers materials, stories, songs and books to share with the children on the current topic. Then next half hour period, beginning at about 11, is a quiet time when the children work on theme-related projects or write in journals. This helps them build independent skills and find pleasure in their individual accomplishments and discoveries.

Between 11:45 and noon, the children wash their hands and walk to the meeting room for lunch with a larger group of school friends. They have a thirty-minute recess full of adventure and large muscle activity. The rest period following this is perfect for relaxing quietly. They may listen to a story on tape, draw quietly, or look at books with soft music in the background. In the afternoon from 1:30 to 2:40, a variety of activities take place. We may choose all together to act out a play, or take a walk around the block to look for fall leaves, or do some baking, or make masks, or have more activity time. We may hammer together a creation at the woodworking table, experiment with science, take on elaborate art projects, visit other classrooms to see their plays and musical performances, etc. This is a time when the teacher has a good opportunity to work with small groups of children as they are engaged in various activities.

By 2:40, we come together for our closing circle and good-byes. The children learn to gather their personal belongings together before walking to the gate to greet their rides home.

Specialists

We have a weekly French session with Gail Mensher in the kindergarten. She introduces colors, numbers, and greetings, and generates various units which may include body parts and clothing, animals and habitats, food and marketing, etc. Movement and song are always part of the French experience. The exact time and day are arranged each year. Ideally, the session will be broken into two shorter sessions so that the children have more personal attention from the teacher.

In addition to French, we have movement one day a week with our instructor, Eric Johnson, who engages the children with music and simple choreography. Our music program includes specialist Pam Gerke who teaches songs (often with movements and/or instruments) and appropriate music fundamentals. This year the children have a class with artist Jodi Waltier every week. We also visit the library once a week to check out books and share literature with our librarian, Marilyn Nicolai.

Curriculum Topics

The curriculum is centered in an integrated fashion around a theme. These themes may change quickly; sometimes just one week is devoted to a theme, or it may run for weeks, depending on the content area and the interest of the children. At times, one major theme may be occurring, with smaller themes interwoven into the experience. A theme may be as straightforward as "spiders" or as complex as "our environment." Themes may often arise from the children's passions. There is no set curriculum in the kindergarten in terms of which topics will be covered each year. Rather, the set curriculum is found more in the types of experiences each child will be involved in each year. But the vehicle, the subject matter, to those experiences will vary. At times, the teacher will suggest a topic, one that she wishes the children to become familiar with; perhaps it is related to an outing or a play.

A handful of typical topics in a given year might be: studying a children's book author and/or artist, becoming familiar with his or her style and with the artwork involved, attending a play or exhibit based on the work; looking at airplanes, how they fly, how we ride on them, visiting the airport, turning the housekeeping area into the inside of an airplane with places for pilots and passengers; looking at owls, how they fly, the food they eat, their nocturnal habits, reading books about owls, pretending to be owls, having a specialist about owls visit the classroom; looking at the Winter Solstice as both an astronomical and anthropological event which may elicit many questions: How have people celebrated and revered this dark time of the year? How does awareness of it contribute to our midwinter celebrations today? Why is it darker at night? Where is the sun? Why is the earth moving?

Symbolic Work

Kindergarten children are beginning to take a natural interest in the symbols about them. They are noticing brand names and usually recognize their own names and perhaps those of family members and friends. Very often, they will know and be able to say some numbers and letters. The children are trying to understand what role these symbols play. They see parents reading, punching numbers into calculators, studying piano music. Often, a child's first step in showing a readiness for learning about symbols comes as he imitates adult work. Perhaps it is in pretending to read, or by dictating to the teacher what he wants recorded. The child may experiment with writing words, copying them from a book, making the same letter over and over, or trying to write his or her name.

The children are at various stages in their developmental awareness of symbols, all appropriate to the kindergarten child, all making progress as they move naturally toward the true entry into more formal symbolic work. The kindergarten teacher supports this symbolic awareness by helping individuals as they make discoveries into this new and exciting world.

Because of this increased interest and awareness, we introduce major approaches to reading acquisition in kindergarten: holistic, sight word and phonetic.

The first step is for the children to practice careful listening. In this day and age when many children are being instructed formally too soon, they often skip some fundamental listening experiences that are absolutely crucial to performing well in language arts. To be sure that our students are well-grounded, we take time early in the kindergarten year to deal specifically with listening skills in a holistic way. For example, they listen to those much-neglected nursery rhymes, clap out the rhythm, and listen for rhyming words. In addition we work with audio discrimination, for example zeroing in on having children listen for specific sounds, sounds at the beginnings of the words and how the opening sounds of words are the same or different. Besides listening for individual sounds, the children listen to parts of words and then repeat them. This encourages them to divide words structurally.

Later on we begin to introduce sound/symbol correspondence which starts the phonetic approach to reading. Activities are designed to help children relate the letter symbol to the sound it makes: They may sort a tray of real objects that begin with the sound of the letter or they might pick out one object that does not share the same sound as the others represented.

By winter, we begin to work in a relaxed way with simple books written by our founder, Pat Overy: I Like Blue (Red, Green, etc.). The children begin to recognize the same words used repeatedly. We treat these as sight words to be memorized without phonetic explanation. The children understand the meaning of the simple story because they know what to anticipate. The language pulls them along holistically in a natural flow.

The children color their own set of little books to keep in a shoebox to read over and over. They may work with these same sight words, "I like…." and "I see….," written on index cards. The teacher will write whole words that are especially meaningful to the child so they may create brief sentences. The children delight in having a small container with their very own words to play with.

Sometime after the first of the year, we begin a more structured approach to phonetics while still maintaining the holistic and sight word ways of reading. By the end of the school year, the kindergartners have been exposed to and learned most of the consonants. In addition they have been introduced to the vowel sounds which are more complicated and subtle. Because of our carefully structured approach to reading in kindergarten, the children are "chomping at the bit" and very ready for the more formally structured approach to language arts in first grade. Of course, some kindergartners are already reading more elaborate texts, and they will have time with their teacher to read together.

In terms of mathematics, kindergarten is the last year when the children still have the luxury of dealing with mathematics predominantly at the concrete level. Spatial math dominates the experience for young children who learn best with hands-on work. Their block structures, often built cooperatively over a period of time, are amazingly complex. They show an understanding of symmetry, asymmetry and balance. Children are able to find and reproduce intricate patterns with manipulatives and to create their own patterns. Using real objects, they deal with the concepts of equal and unequal and greater and less than.

In much the same way that we teach reading, we introduce number symbols with great care. We begin orally with the children doing lots of counting, counting rhymes, and one to one correspondence. We use numbers when talking about the calendar, birthdays, ages and by taking our own measurements, etc. The children learn to recognize written number symbols and what they stand for.

By working with concrete objects (blocks, shapes, counters, wooden pegs and boards) first, the children are encouraged to develop the notion that math is truly a reflection of the real world. In that way, they can begin to understand that number symbols represent a physical reality, rather than just a set of abstractions to be memorized.