No

I have a dilemma.

A parent told me her child wants a different locker.

I want to say ‘NO’.

The thing is, I try not to say no without good reason.  I think of myself as someone who does not set unnecessary limits for children.

Why do I want to say no to a change of locker?  The locker is available.

Well – None of the other children got to choose their lockers.  It is much easier to have the lockers in use grouped together. We have extremely limited time to do admin work, and I am reluctant to spend it creating new locker labels or peeling off old ones.

Those are reasons, of a sort.  But they are not very strong ones.

And my real reason, when I think about it, is that I want to say no to this child.

I am finding this child demanding.  There is difficult behaviour.  Requests are ignored.  Help is not given.  Boundaries are not respected.

I believe I should work to get the child to feel involved.  Build a strong relationship.  Praise.  Connect. Recognise strengths.  Interact. Be responsive. Create a sense of belonging.  And I am doing those things.

But I also feel a strong need to say no to this.

I want to send the message ‘you don’t get everything you want just because you say you want it’.

And I feel a need to assert hierarchy.

I want to say no so the child learns I am in charge.

I don’t like recognising this in myself.  I am conflicted. I wonder if I am wrong to feel this way.

But I still do.

Is this love?

Anne Stonehouse poses the question whether educators should describe as ‘love’ the relationships they have with children.  She is dubious about the phrase ‘I just love children’ as often used by educators in interviews. She argues that respect is more the issue than love.

I agree that ‘I just love children’ should be treated with caution. It is often a thoughtless, throwaway line, produced to avoid thinking of a more careful answer.

But I do not think ‘love’ is an inappropriate term for what we do. Educating young children is emotional work. It involves forging genuine relationships. It involves deep personal bonds.

Family love is, of course, different. We do not love the children we work with in the same way we love our own children.

And yet.

Love is unconditional. Love is supportive. Love is a deep commitment to a relationship with that person.  Isn’t that what we aim for in our relationships with children?

We do – we must – have a deep commitment to each child we teach. When we do our best work, I think perhaps ‘love’ is the most appropriate word to describe the strength of the bond we have with that child.

Puddle

I promised myself this school year I would live by the mantra ‘no such thing as bad weather’. We would spend as much time as possible outside.  We would let the children go outside in all weathers. We would let them be the judge of when they wanted to be outside or in.

This week was the first real test of our resolve.

We had no horrid heat in the early weeks of the year. Even with our late afternoon timetable, the summer classes enjoyed balmy days.

This week, after Samhain, as the leaves fell from the trees, a cold wind blew in from Antarctica.  Temperatures fell. And today it rained.  And rained and rained.

We did not push the kids to go out.  We are starting inside. When the first child asks to go out, one of us goes to0, and a few (most) usually follow.

Today, they were not asking.  We were all inside for a long time.

But eventually someone did want to go out.  So we found jackets and coats and gumboots. A lot were not very well equipped.  They had coats, but not raincoats.  They had no gumboots. But it was not really all that cold.  The rain was steady, but light. Inside was warm and dry, and everyone had a change of clothes.

Nothing to be afraid of.

I was just a little worried about their shoes.  There were puddles.  Muddy ones.  I could change their pants, but I could not do anything to fix wet shoes. So we decided that people who wanted to walk in the  puddles had to take their shoes and socks off first.

Most of the children gave it a go.  Even one who had gumboots.  Then they dried their feet and put their shoes back on.

I just wish we had worked out a system for recognising socks before we let the children strip them off.

Eggs for Easter

See how beautifully our red eggs turned out.

I found proper Orthodox egg dye in our local supermarket.  They had two types in fact.  For one the method involved cooking the eggs in the dye.  I chose the one where you boil the eggs first, and put them in dye at room temperature.  Much easier at kinder.

I got the kids to draw on the eggs first with wax crayon.  They are quite young, and new at kinder, so just getting the crayons to make any kind of mark was a puzzle for them.  We dyed them and watched them turn bright red.  The children were as fascinated as any teacher could hope.

I had planned to polish them with oil as well – remembered to bring a rag from home.  But we had plenty to do without that.

A new boy was a bit upset. He has a Greek name.  I rightly guessed he would made some eggs with a grandmother.  We drew on and dyed an egg together. It made a great link between school and home.  +1 for belonging.

We painted on egg shaped paper and searched the garden for little plastic eggs with chicks inside.

Several families had remembered my request to bring in Easter egg wrappers.  We used them for collage, on (vaguely) egg shaped paper.

We sent the red eggs home.

So that is what we did for Easter in the end.

Flowers are red

A friend linked me to this song by Dawud Warnsby. She used to use it with students of early childhood education.

It is lovely. It vividly illustrates the idea that children should be allowed to see the world in their own creative and honest ways, and not be locked into stereotypes.

I am sure none of us would recognise ourselves in the teacher that insisted flowers can only be red.

Early childhood educators in Australia are pretty strongly wedded to the idea that we want to foster creativity in children.  We are quick to produce the right language about child centred practice, about process art, about individuality.

The song is a reductio ad absurdum. It is easy not to sympathise with that stern looking teacher and her silly rules.  We would never be that teacher.

But how good are we at seeing all the other ways that we are involved in institutionalising children?

And how good are we at questioning them?

Easter

We have one week to go until we break up for the Easter holidays.

There are some quite strong traditions around Easter in kindergartens. Making little baskets to put eggs in. Easter egg hunts.  Imagery of eggs, chickens and rabbits.  Talk of the Easter Bunny.

When I taught an Italian-English bilingual program, I always made a point of choosing different imagery for Easter.  I drew from the Italian artistic tradition, and used doves and lambs.  The dove is a traditional symbol of the holy spirit.  The Italian Easter cake – colomba – is dove shaped.  The lamb is a traditional icon of Christ as the ‘Paschal sacrifice’ – the Lamb of God.  A lot of Australians eat lamb for feast days, including Easter.  I did not tell the children the story of Easter, though.  It feels a bit solemn for 3-4 year olds.

This year, I am teaching three year olds (mainstream) and I find I don’t want to ‘do’ Easter with them at all at the moment.  I think it would be meaningless for them this week. I have asked them, and they don’t really remember last Easter, when they were 2.  I don’t want to give them chocolate Easter eggs.  I think they get enough sugar elsewhere.

We have chicken hatching at the moment.  We chose the weeks close to Easter on purpose, for the egg connection.  But we are not being very explicit about it.

When we come back after Easter feels like a better time to include this celebration in our curriculum. After they have experienced Easter recently, and with their more powerful three year old ability to store memories.

A lot of my class has some Greek heritage, and Greek Easter is the week after western Easter (15 April this year).  I think I fancy dying some red eggs with them, like the Greeks do.  Perhaps we will do some collage with Easter egg wrappers.  We could paint on egg shaped paper.  We can talk about what the families did for Easter.  About families and celebration and holidays. And see where that takes us.

Opal Rainbow

I learnt a song last weekend, from Stiff Gins singer-songwriters Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs. It is called Opal Rainbow, and is in Language.

Nardi and Kaleena taught us this song in a workshop.  We sang the chorus with them, and they filled in the verses.  It tells a story of going searching the scrailings for opals that the miners might have missed. Nardi provides evocative mime that helps support the story.

For the first couple of days, a gospel song from the same folk festival took up residence in my head and blocked out the tune of Opal Rainbow.  But on my walk to work yesterday, the tune and lyrics of the chorus came back to me.

I wanted to share it with the children, but I was not sure how I could manage it, and whether they could take to it.  The group I am teaching at the moment are very little.  I can barely get them to join in on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

But as circle time approached, I resolved to sing it to them anyway.  At least it might help me remember.

I had a brain wave to add clapping sticks.  I could not find the good ones at short notice, but I grabbed a few pieces of dowel from a wooden construction set.  (Nardi uses her thongs, after all.)

I gave each child a pair of sticks, set up a rhythm and sang to them.

They worked intently on their clapping technique.  They did not care about the song or the lyrics.  But as I sang to them over and over, they fell into time.

The last line of the song is chanted, and the sticks are clapped fast and out of rhythm. It provides nice punctuation to end the song. It makes the children smile.

As I finished singing for the tenth time, the children cred ‘again’.

I have a hit.

The lyrics are (have to check the spelling) :

Geyarra-gi dhay
Geyarra-gi dhay

Yuluwirrigirr
Yuluwirrigirr

Geyarra-gi dhay
Geyarra-gi dhay

Yuluwirrigirr
Yuluwirrigirr

Gandanganda

 

.

You can hear Stiff Gins on You Tube. This song Yandool is in Wiradjuri.  It is a lovely taste of their music, though not so suitable for singing with young children.  I have not been able to find a performance of Opal Rainbow yet to share with you.

Stiff Gins also do workshops for children (though more for schools than early childhood, I gather).  They are very engaging and great performers and teachers, as well as good musicians.  Look out for them.

Bit thin on the ground

We are used to educators whinging about having too many students. Lamenting a small class is not so common.  But that is my problem now.

I am used to teaching 22 students. At 25, I get a bit stressed.  18 is great.  15 is ok.  Even 12 at a pinch.

But at the moment I only have 5.  And it is not enough.

After I have set up some activities, dealt with the separation anxiety, done some intentional teaching and had some quality interactions, I feel like I need to back off a bit and give them some space.  I don’t want to be in their faces all the time.

So I write a few obs, and twiddle my thumbs for a while until somebody needs me.

The thing is, I know there are educators that are geared to work with 4-5 kids all the time. I have these kids for 2.5 hours.  I don’t know what I would do with them for a whole day, like they do in FDC.  The rhythms and patterns of their work are another world to me.

I suppose it goes to show how our habits and skills are particular to one setting (or age group or timeframe) and do not automatically transfer.

This is what effective preschool looks like

In Britain, a longitudinal study – known as EPPE – has been following a cohort of children for 16 years, watching for the impact of quality preschool education. This is what they say high quality preschool education looks like:

“The findings show that good outcomes for children are linked to early years settings that:

• View cognitive and social development of children as complementary and do not prioritise one over the other.
• Have strong leadership and long-serving staff (three years plus, this was even the case in the private daycare settings where the turnover of staff is normally the highest).
• Provide a strong educational focus with trained teachers working alongside and supporting less qualified staff.
• Provide children with a mixture of practitioner initiated group work and learning through freely chosen play.
• Provide adult-child interactions that involve ‘sustained shared thinking’ and open-ended questioning to extend children’s thinking.
• Have practitioners with good curriculum knowledge combined with knowledge and understanding of how young children learn.
• Have strong parental involvement, especially in terms of shared educational aims with parents.
• Provide formative feedback to children during activities and provide regular reporting and discussion with parents about their child’s progress.
• Ensure behaviour policies in which staff support children in rationalising and talking through their conflicts
• Provide differentiated learning opportunities that meet the needs of particular individuals and groups of children e.g. bilingual, special needs, girls/boys etc.”

Follow up on EPPE publications here.

No such thing as bad weather

We are determined to embrace the view that there is no such thing as bad weather.

All weather is good weather, and we plan to be out in it.

Last week, our resolve was tested.

On our first day, it was 36°.  That is pretty hot.

But the garden is shady, and we were ok. We let the children choose whether to be in or out, and most of them chose to be out.

The next day, it rained.

We let the children decide whether to be in or out, and most of them chose to go in. Two hardy souls stayed out.  We talked about where the rain came from.

Then there was thunder. I decided discretion was the better part of valour and we went inside.

We did not turn the lights on, even when the sky filled with dark grey clouds and it got really dark.

We watched the rain spatter the windows, and pour over the gutters.