In the West Wing, children are introduced to our Reflection Meeting: a time before lunch when children gather together to revisit, reflect on, and discuss the work of the morning appointments. One important skill that children learn through these meetings is how to engage in authentic dialogue with their peers. This skill, like so many others, takes a lot of practice to develop. We begin the year by modeling the back-and-forth of listening and responding, using our persona dolls and picture books to introduce the concept and structure of reciprocal conversations.
Reflecting on a book that’s just been read invites the children to recall personal experiences as they relate to the character from the book. This reflection is an opportunity to encourage the children to participate in expanding their perspective: thinking about how others may be thinking similarly or differently.
One book that we have used is Daniel’s Good Day by Micha Archer. This book follows Daniel as he asks the people in his neighborhood “What makes a good day for you?”. It allows us to begin to talk about race and racial identities. (“Here’s Daniel. Daniel has curly brown hair and light brown skin. This is his mom. Her skin is a chocolate brown. And this is Daniel’s baby brother, whose skin looks like the color of the sand on the beach. Daniel and his family may identify as Black. Let’s see who else we meet in his neighborhood.”) It allows us to talk about types of people and families. And it allows us to think about how people are both the same and different from one another. We see how all of the different people in Daniel’s neighborhood have different answers to the same question.
After reading Daniel’s Good Day, Dana posed the same question to the group:
Dana: What makes a good day for you?
Evyn: Ice cream and Disneyland!
Emma: Ice cream and have a playdate with Evyn and Arya.
Arya: Ice cream. Pink ice cream.
Marcel: Bubble gum
Cary: Sing [The] Fire Engine [song]
Eddie: Cary
Dana: Spending time with Cary makes a good day for you?
Eddie: Yes
Spencer: Bubble gum, ice cream. One is cotton candy and lollipops [that have] gum.
Ana: Vanilla Ice Cream.
Olivia: Ice cream with Franny [a friend’s dog].
Leon: [My dog] Benny.
From ice cream to bubble gum to dogs, we see here how the children are beginning to follow and then expand upon the threads of conversation from one another. For example, Evyn exclaims that a good day for her features ice cream. Then Arya picks up on that idea and adds another detail: it’s pink ice cream. Marcel, perhaps influenced by the color pink, thinks of bubblegum. Spencer picks up on both ice cream and bubble gum. And so on. This ability to take in the words of others and then add their own voice and perspective to the conversation is a skill that allows children to participate fully in the school community and in the larger community outside of The New School-West’s walls.