2013_3_4 WW OPEN HOUSE, a set on Flickr.
At the West Wing Open House last month, the teachers presented both informally and formally on what the children have been doing and the overall intentions and conclusions associated with these myriad activities. This always involves extensive preparation on their part, and your Documentation Committee felt it might be valuable to compile and post each teacher’s personal notes for the benefit of all, and especially for those parents who may not have been able to attend that night. Needless to say, this took a little extra time. But here they are! Please read and enjoy! (And you can click on the colored Flickr photoset link, too, as usual, to see some images from the evening…)
AMY – INTRO
Welcome and thank you for coming out after a long day. The teachers and I are happy to have an evening were we could share with you just a few of the many stories that are happening at this point in the year. Our intention for the classroom has evolved to focus on storytelling and how it contributes to the children’s social, emotional, cognitive, creative and physical development. Silvana, Dru and Kris said it so beautifully on our intention wall so I am going to read it to you. Storytelling, which also means story creating, communicates ideas, feelings, one’s voice and foster’s creativity. Whether inventing entire worlds in the Block Area, roles in dramatic play, or illustrating a monster in a painting, children actively engage in developing stories. When children compose narratives, it encourages participation and builds a sense of community. They learn about each other and deepen interpersonal connections through sharing. When teachers take dictation, children feel validated, and often sort through issues from their real lives. They begin to know their own voices, to listen to and value friends’ ideas and feel empowered as storytellers.
SILVANA – EMOTIONAL STORYTELLING
Slide one (collage of facial expressions): storytelling not only plays an important role in children’s linguistic and literacy skills, but it also plays an important role in their emotional development.
Slide two (enna and lucy): storytelling is a safe place where children can explore various emotional states, without the risk of experiencing an actual emotion.
Slide three (children role playing fear)
When children tell stories, they pretend they are going through different scenarios and associated emotions from the perspective of story characters or roles they play out. This group of children love playing out fear. Someone or something is always going to a forest and getting frightened by something spooky.
Slide four (the scary monster eating bird story): For example, read the story aloud.
Slide five: In the beginning of the year, many of the children were creating stories alone with focus dictation from the teachers at the communication center. The teachers met and came up with strategies on how we could inspire the children to collaborate on a story.
Slide six (funny expressions): We’ve been taking new photos for their current identity panels. As you can see, they had a lot of fun displaying various facial expressions when their pictures were being taken.
Slide seven (ben, maddie, and Sophia) We gathered their images and printed them out for the children to view at the communication center in hopes that they would convey emotions when developing a story together. Here, Ben, Sophia, and Maddie are looking at pictures of Aurora. Having a whole year on investigating emotions, they were able to recognize and identify the emotions she was expressing.
Slide seven (Aurora story): Here’s the story they came up with. Read story. Ask parents what emotions do they think the children explored.
Slide eight (maddie talking) Not only did they play with emotions, but these kids hit a milestone. A year ago they would interrupt each other when one of them would try to share an idea. And in this experience it was so gratifying as a teacher to watch them bounce and build ideas off each other.
Slide nine (image of collage birds): Another observation we’ve made, is that many of the children are influenced by media when developing a story. A strategy we use to provoke the children in creating original story lines, is to have them be inspired by their own work. How powerful is that. These are characters that came from a small group investigating paper collage with our studio teacher Amy, in the back patio studio. She scaled them down and are now living at the communication center. Here’s a little video. Show video. These girls who mostly play out princess characters, shifted from media characters to real life roles. Playing out real life roles supports children to process emotions they may not have been able to in conversation.
Slide eleven (image of house area) Another safe place where children can explore emotions through role playing is the house area. You might think, “what does my child do all day in the house area?” It’s a magical place. If you ever have time, make yourself small and sit on the green couch to observe what unfolds.
Slide twelve (kids driving) You are your child’s first teacher. So if you drop a “s” word, we may hear it in the house area. Now don’t get alarmed. This is an amazing group of children. We have never seen a more patient, empathetic group of children who tolerate such challenging babies their peers play out.
FLORA – GARDEN
Garden: “From wonder into wonder existence opens.” Lao- Tzu.
We’ve been meeting in the garden area all year in small groups to foster a connection to nature. As the children spend more and more time in the garden their connections and observations develop as the plants change and grow.
When we returned from a weekend to discover something had been eating the broccoli, the children’s theories about how it happened emerged.
Noticing the impact this discovery had made on this group of children, I asked them if they would bring this information back to our reflection meeting.
Marek: It’s a mystery! We need to dig the soil to see if something is eating our broccoli.
The teachers met with with a small group the following day to gather more information about their hypothesis using drawing as a tool to visually express their ideas.
Fiona: It was a snail. A snail ate the broccoli.
Right picture-Mateo: I think a butterfly ate the broccoli. We need a scarecrow that goes ‘BOO!’ and scare the butterflies away.
Jude’s theory:A horse and a reindeer jumped over the fence and ate it. Above is the original horse, jumping the fence to eat the broccoli. Below is the horse Jude was able to draw from memory two days later. In a third one he helped Langston draw a horse.
Langston: I can only draw a boat! Feeling confident now in drawing, Jude says: “here, I can help you draw some broccoli.”
Langston was open to collaboration and said: “ You can draw it right here.”
Deia’s theory: It’s a mystery…you know who really really really likes broccoli? A unicorn, but I also like broccoli and a worm likes broccoli. But I didn’t eat it, so a worm or the unicorn ate it.
By keeping the mystery we support the inspiration for searching that is their entry point not ours. We have our own background history on what or how plants get eaten but it is these children’s rights to discover and construct their own history.
PAOLA – FROM EXPERIENCE TO POETRY
Tinkering: to manipulate experimentally and to enjoy testing innovative ideas. When we can apply this manipulation to words and imagery as a tool to reflect on an experience, we have the beginnings of something I personally believe to be magical: We have the beginnings of story and poetry. The seeds of poetry are found everywhere. The creation of a poem is much like an invitation for our children to understand themselves, others and their world in new ways. It enables us to appreciate the sounds and imagery of language.
WW: Kite interest. running dragging. no lift needed to fly. What would happen if provided with the gust they needed? Fan set up in entry hallway. Their joy was contagious. Experiences like this are filled with the sounds of excitement and inquiry but little dialogue. Since the focus of this discussion afternoon is storytelling we will not go into the physics of these experiments. We decided to use the spark of this interest to invite the children to join us in the documentation process.
Poetry with Children
Children slow down and imagine each experience’s smell, sound, touch, taste, and motion through dialogue.
Responses are written down and read back to them.
During read back, children edit or add simile and onomatopoeia to another’s line.
Poem by Kahea, Enna, Noah, and Xylia
we make air
when we breathe
my mouth makes it for me
tastes like syrup
it comes from my belly
ehk-ehk out
it comes out your body
flies out the window
into the sky
feels cold like wind
freezing
“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” -Muriel Rukeyser
The WW children also share a fascination with a certain kind of story. Spooky tales with scary entities tormenting the protagonists.
Emmet, Nico, and Danny expressed a desire to play a ghost movie in the Tinkering Space. I invited them to represent the story on the overhead projector.
The accepted the invitation and used the materials available to give their story life. Their story shows that they have an understanding of the elements of a basic story: a protagonist, an antogonist, a plot, a climax, and conclusion.
Ghost story
This is the ghost. He is mean and sometimes eats up people. He is hiding behind the tree. He is going to try to eat them. The ghost’s name is Captain Hook. Kid’s names are Izzy and Jake. They are holding hands. They are running from the ghost. The ghost might get them. They point at the leaf and say, “What’s that thing!?” The yellow covers them so they aren’t scared. They are sleepy in the red. They sleep in the rocks. The ghost went away. The ghost can’t eat them because they are ghosts too. Now everyone is sleeping and they are dreaming.
“Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.” -Rumi
In this work, I am constantly reminded of this quote. One of my objectives is to go back to the mind set where I can see color like a child. I believe that most adults loose some hues as we age. Research proves it. We use more of our brain in childhood and after the pruning process we hold on to the synapses we use most and the others stay dormant. Through many a dialogue with children, I have been reminded of the duality of their world: simple yet complex. They awaken the synapses that allow me to remember that smiles taste silly like eating watermelon (Langston) and friendship feels like the sensation of a hula dance (Dot).
DRU – BLOCKS TALK
Diversity of stimulation means novelty and novelty means challenge to thought. – John Dewey
I noticed that the students were excited while singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, specifically while changing their voices from medium to tiny, to loud…imagining different sized spiders.
It got me thinking about scale and how we might funnel that enthusiasm to the block area. Small children always seem to love tiny things anyway, so I thought a project that would make them need to consider scale would be a worthwhile and fun cognitive exercise.
The next morning, before circle, I was spending time with Sophia, playing with the Tangram blocks. She became excited when she realized she could make tiny houses with them. “Wouldn’t it be fun to build a whole tiny town out of these?”
Other friends heard this and someone said, “Yeah, let’s build a tiny town!”
I asked, “Who lives in Tiny Town?”
Someone said, “Spiders!”
“What do we need for Tiny Town?”
“It’s a tiny town, so we need tiny things,” said Emmett.
Photo 1:
Here are Chloe, Dot, and Aurora totally engaged.
The inset shows Emmett making an elevator for a spider.
Photo 2:
Tangrams are usually used like mosaics, flat on the table, but here, Charlie turns them on end to build a small house. At far left is another tiny building made of Tangrams.
Photo 3:
After they finished building Tiny Town for the day, I took their story dictation in a tiny book, which they later illustrated. They recorded and expanded upon the narrative they had created in conjunction with their building project. A story was born out of this particular setting that they had imagined and brought to life.
Sage, Sophia, and Aurora read the Tiny Town book to each other.
Photo 4:
Later, Andrew walked through and asked what was going on. He asked me to read him the book the other children had written.
He remarked that the book mentioned Disneyland and a fire, but he didn’t see those things represented in the constructed Tiny Town.
Photo 5:
So, the next day, I told the Tiny Town builders what Andrew had observed and they set about amending their construction, adding Disneyland and a fire.
They used metallic paper for fire.
Inset shows Aurora making Disneyland.
They also added more and more buildings to their town. Sage built a spider store. The more details they added, the more particular and vivid the sense of place became.
Photo 6:
Here Charlie and Sage collaborate in building a house for a spider.
Next, I have a movie that shows a sweet example of scaffolding between Charlie and Sage.
7. Movie
Photo 8:
They seemed to be responding to the concept of scale, but we wanted to test that theory.
I introduced three characters to the mix:
A large bear, a medium-sized baby, and a small spider.
Photo 9:
Here we see Lucy and Chloe building baby houses.
Mateo built a house for the spider and the teddy bear.
Photo 10:
I asked, “What happens if it rains?”
Here Lucy tucks babies into small buildings, adding a roof to one below. She seems completely happy and proud of her work.
Photo 11:
Chloe also builds a house for a baby.
Note that most of these houses are just big enough for the resident to lie down in, with no room to stand up or walk around.
This is something that will no doubt address in the future.
Photo 12:
Here is Mateo adding a roof to a house.
Chloe, Lucy, and Mateo are clearly thinking about scale, because they are creating custom-sized buildings for spiders, babies, and a bear.
_____________________________________________________
So getting back to John Dewey…First, “Diversity of stimulation means novelty…”
We had never used Tangrams and magnet blocks on the block platform. The children were building something new, relating to familiar materials with new intent.
And second, “…novelty means challenge to thought.”
The addition of the three different-sized inhabitants, introduced more diversity, more novelty.
These different elements were added in response to specific interests of the children.
This encouraged new ways of thinking about scale.
KATHERINE – SEWING
When I was thinking how is sewing connected to storytelling in the eyes of the children. I go back to the Parent Back to School Night were the parents were asked to design a runner with images that would connect the interest of their children from hoe to school.
So the parents came up with what’s familiar to their children: A pacifier for a child who likes to care for babies, or a broom for a child who likes to help with chores at home, or an apples the child’s favorite food and lastly a picture of family as an image that is filled with lots of connections from home. Because of the limited time on Parent’s back to School Night the children get to work on the parents designed runner.
The next day the children were inspired by their parents images and came up with with stories close to their hearts. The children’s illustrations for the runner connect the interest from home to school and now include a story on a new runner that conveys their interest here at school like rainbow, flowers, aliens, happy face, and much more.
PARENT QUOTE
“The teachers’ presentations about storytelling opened a window into our kids’ world at NSW. It’s a great feeling to know how much care, effort, and creativity they put into encouraging our children to explore their imaginations to the fullest.” – Sarah Meagher (Riley WW)