Welcome to My Classroom: A Day with K

A bit of the main garden with the playground hidden behind the mango trees

I got to spend the day with a healthy K for the first time in a while. Last week she was sick and we mostly read stories together and napped. Now that she is going to preschool three days a week, the majority of my work on the farm has centered around developing the preschool cooperative. Today, however, K and I spent a solid chunk of time together and most of it was out and about on the farm doing various chores and exploring the landscape. It occurred to me how unfair it is that not all kids have the freedom to self-direct their play in the way that K and I do, since the Reggio Approach is still so new to American education. We are lucky that K’s mom is familiar with and supports the approach’s idea of an emergent curriculum, where knowledge is acquired through interest-led interactions with the environment. We are also lucky that K lives in such a rich and enticing natural environment. The farm has added volumes to our curriculum, making it easy for me weave all sorts of academics into our play because the environment is so naturally stimulating and engaging.

Many critics of the Reggio Approach argue that left to their own direction, kids would never choose to pursue academic endeavors. While this might be initially true for older students who have never had the opportunity to direct their own learning, I can confidently say from experience that this is not the case for students whose education has supported their intellectual curiosities from the very beginning. Because I trust K to show me what she needs and wants to learn, and I trust my own ability to build a flexible and quality curriculum around my observations of her, I know she is always interested and motivated to learn. It is a different kind of teaching in the Reggio Approach and it takes some getting used to for sure, especially considering most of us grew up with traditional education programs. The benefits, however, for both K and I are well-worth the effort it took to transform my approach. Through an emergent curriculum we collaborate on projects more-or-less as equals, though we play our respective roles as teacher and student. We both spend our days learning, having fun together, building our relationship, and challenging one another to grow and roll with the continual ebb and flow of life. 

K and I love to observe the chickens pecking for bugs beneath the mango trees in their pen. We often bring them kale from the garden, peek in on them as they snuggle in to lay, and collect their delicious, fresh eggs, one of K's and my foods.

When I met up with K this morning, she was finishing up her breakfast, quickly stuffing the last few bites of omelette into her mouth when she saw me so that we could get to work. I asked her to please slow down so she didn’t choke on her food and reminded her that we had to wash hands and wipe down the table before moving on to drawing, which is how she decided she wanted to start the day. After taking care of our responsibilities we started to draw with colored pencils. K is all about mastering her fine motor skills and is drawn to just about any task that allows her to work on them, so drawing is a particularly appealing activity. I love creating art with K because when she is so focused on a task that we are able to carry on very natural and genuine conversations as we work on our projects alongside one another, sometimes collaborating, sometimes working individually. I was drawing a pattern with triangles and K asked how to draw one. I paused to show her, hand over-hand. She was more interested in circles and asked to draw those, so we practiced that shape as well. I told her that when I want to do something well, I practice it over and over again so that I can get better and make my shapes look more how I want them to. Then I drew five small circles in a row as she watched intently.

We worked on our art for nearly 30 minutes, K making circles and various lines while I worked on my triangle pattern. She had a color that I wanted to use and so we got in some sharing practice. She didn’t want to give me the red pencil so I politely asked if I could use it when she was all done, explaining that I could keep using the orange and yellow pencils until she was finished using the red. She agreed and after a few minutes she said “here you go” and handed me the pencil. I thanked her and started drawing my triangles and after watching me for a few moments she asked for the pencil back. I told her I needed to draw and color in a few more triangles and then I would return it to her. She continued using the orange, patiently waiting until I was done with the red. Among her scribbles, K noticed a pattern and pointed to her page saying, “mountain” to show me what she had drawn. “You did draw a mountain,” I remarked pointing at her drawing, “I see it right there.” K smiled. I smiled back. Then she asked to listen to “Apples and Banono’s” her current favorite (K prefers the Keith Urban version of this classic Raffi song). We danced around and did some yoga for the rest of the hour, read a few stories and then headed out to the garden.

By 9:15am, we had already worked art, literacy, music, and creative movement into our daily curriculum. We worked on fine motor skills, practiced personal responsibility, patience, and sharing, we got in a little exercise, and we worked on conversational skills, yet we were relaxed, had a great time and allowed our natural motivation and interest tell us when it was time to move onto the next activity. Sure my studies in education and human development have helped me understand children’s attention span for activities at different ages, but more importantly my ability to tune into and participate in K’s educational experience and learning style is what I rely on when we work together. I make our activities as interesting and enjoyable as possible to get the maximum educational benefit from each, but when K loses motivation to continue I follow her lead and we move onto the next activity that draws her in. It is a waste of both our time and energy for me to stick to a prescribed schedule because when she isn’t engaged, she isn’t learning anything except that my agenda is more important than hers and I do not respect her enough to think her capable of playing a role in her own learning process. That is not a message I want K, or any of my students to internalize.

I want K to trust her own instincts, listen to her physical, emotional, social, and intellectual needs. I want her to see how satisfying and meaningful learning can be and much fun she can have practicing her favorite skills and seeking out the answers to her many questions. So when K asked to take our adventures outdoors, I grabbed my water bottle and invited her to pick out a pair of shoes and hat. We started by heading up to the cherry tree to pick ourselves a delicious and healthy snack. We worked on our colors, identifying the darkest red ones because those are the ripest and most delicious. I explained that the darkest ones are the ones that have soaked in the most sun and are therefore the sweetest. “I got one!” K said when she found a dark cherry, holding it up to show me. Instead of telling her “good job,” I said with enthusiasm, “that one is dark, I found a dark one too,” I showed her mine and we both popped the sweet fruit into our mouths. Since I am partial to a Reggio-Inspired teaching style, my objective is not to evaluate her activities or judge her success, but rather to share and participate in her learning process, expose her to new experiences, and invite her to explore alternative possibilities and multiple perspectives.

Once K and I had our fill of cherries, I suggested we check on the tomatoes, since I harvested pounds of them over the weekend and knew there were a ton more that had since ripened. K loves the garden because it means she gets to work her fine motor skills in relation to food, two of her most favorite things right now. K loves to taste the garden, asking first for the name of each plant and then asking for a taste. I love walking through the garden with her because all that naming builds her vocabulary and all that tasting helps enrich her culinary experiences while adding depth to her knowledge and understanding of plant biology and agricultural sciences. Both the naming and the eating help her develop a pleasurable association with healthy food, a deeper connection with the natural world and the possibilities associated with a more self-sufficient lifestyle. Again we had the chance to practice selecting the best fruit for harvest and while just a few weeks ago K was regularly pulling the green “baby” tomatoes and tossing them on the ground, today she identified the reddest ones, pointing and checking to make sure it was a quality selection with a “see me pick it?” This is huge for K, who until very recently, loved to test her boundaries in the garden. She has learned that not all the food is for picking and that there are specific windows for optimal harvesting. I shared with her how impressed I was by the respect and responsibility she showed for the plants in the garden. She smiled.

When I reminded her that it is wasteful to eat only the insides of the tomatoes, K took care to eat the whole thing, rather than tossing it to the ground after a few nibbles. I happily offered her another tomato when she was done, which she gratefully accepted. Today K had my full trust as she perused the garden freely. She proved to me with her care and thoughtfulness, her patience, and restraint that she is ready for the responsibility of being a participatory member of the farm. She earned a notch in her gardener’s belt as we harvested tomatoes, vine-dried lima beans, and a watermelon radish the side of a soft-ball which we promptly and enthusiastically took back to my kitchen to prep and eat. I showed K the nail brush that I use scrub the root vegetables and her whole face beamed with her quiet excitement when I pulled a chair up to the sink and let her scrub to her hearts content. I narrated my actions as I carefully got out the chef’s knife and sliced up the radish, reminding her to keep her fingers safe and away from where I was cutting. K watched as the deep pink of the inner radish became more exposed with each cut. It was an enormous radish though, so I was at it for a while and she quickly lost interest. She was, however, not yet satisfied with her scrubbing work so she began to wash the few forks, spoons, and coffee cups in the sink. I really need to get on that play kitchen for K, I thought to myself as I watched her fall happily into the zone of sensory play and fine motor development.

We listened to Sam Cooke croon as we worked quietly, side-by-side, each deeply focusing on our task. I was practicing my best and safest knife skills, cognizant of how I was modeling this responsibility to K, who is always observing me (later that day I saw her replicating the “safe grip” I demonstrated as she “cut” her velcro play food). Once in awhile she asked for a slice of radish, reveling in its spicy crunch, and together we arranged a plate of the pretty pink and green veggies to offer up to our friends on the farm. K and I spent over two hours soaking up the sunshine and priceless lessons in agriculture, botany, culinary sciences, and biology. We took in a rainbow of sensory experiences, more personal and social responsibility development, and worked our fine motor skills as we twisted, picked, plucked, grabbed, and gripped the various shapes and textures across the farm. We shelled and collected an entire jar full of dried lima beans to store for soup on a rainy day in the future, fed the chickens some dried kale and admired the new baby duckling, observing how the mama protects and cares for her vulnerable little one.

When our time together came to a close, K was exhausted from all the adventures. We packed a ton of lessons in today and far more than usual, spanning a wide variety of subjects, yet we had a great time together without any conflict whatsoever. We had an amazing day together and my faith in the power of an emergent curriculum grew even stronger. Nothing about our day together was planned, except that K’s mom suggested last night that the lima beans were ready for picking. I mentioned it to K when I first arrived during breakfast but although she was interested in the idea, K elected to start our day inside. I didn’t pressure or try to persuade her, trusting that she’d let me know when she was ready to head out and tackle the job. When we stumbled upon the lima beans after feeding the chickens I asked her again if she was interested and this seeing the big green and brown pods hanging above her head was more than enough to entice her. K thoroughly enjoyed opening the crispy, dried pods and collecting the big white beans in the jar.

K and I allowed our interests and motivation to guide our curriculum in true Reggio fashion. It was a beautiful, exciting, and intellectually stimulating day. We did meaningful and enjoyable work, sometimes collaboratively and sometimes independently side-by-side. I don’t believe for one second that it is a coincidence this was one of our best days together. We were fully engaged in the process of learning and we were enjoying ourselves so much that time seemed to fly by. It is days like this that remind me why I love what I do and why I believe so passionately in the Reggio Approach as the most effective way to transform our struggling public school system. Though this approach was designed for early education, the philosophy applies beautifully to learning at any age and paves the way for self-directed, project based, and interdisciplinary learning. This is the kind of education that is meaningful, relevant, gratifying, and leaves teachers and students alike excited to get out of bed every morning and get to work. Just imagine for a moment a world in which this is the norm and perhaps you will understand my enthusiasm for the Reggio Approach.

Literature: the Backbone of Learning

As I review my curriculum outline and begin to piece together the classroom materials needed to breathe life into the farm preschool cooperative, I find myself relying more and more on children’s books to address the various fields of knowledge we have selected as the focus of this program. I love children’s literature and as a teacher I have found that it is often the most powerful tool I have to connect with students of all different learning styles with every imaginable interest. But books do more so much more than simply provide bonding opportunities, though if that was all they did I wouldn’t think them any less powerful or important. Stories allow children to enter all different worlds, to vicariously experience challenges and pleasures through characters they come to love. Stories give life to the lessons being addressed in the classroom while at the same time inspiring new ideas for where to to go next in the process of discovery. But mostly I love stories for the depth of creativity, innovation, and thought that they provoke. Many of my most memorable conversations and activities with students have come from sharing and discussing a beloved story together.

While my research children’s books to complement each component of the three core areas of the farm preschool curriculum (Social & Personal Responsibility, Agriculture & Sustainability, Creativity & the Arts), I find myself drifting back to the stories I read over and over again with my 4s class kids at Bella Mente. For a while, we used books as the backbone of our school curricula, selecting a new book every week or so, using the images and ideas in the story to shape our daily activities. Sometimes we teachers picked a book and other times we picked a book that the students were showing particular interest in, but each time it was a huge success. Because of that experience, I am able to put together a diverse and powerful library for K and her friends to learn about themselves, the world, and their places within it. Currently, K and I are using her favorite stories to build vocabulary, she being a bit too young still for the kind of curriculum projects I did with the 4-year-olds previously. K’s favorite right now is a book of silly, fantastical poems by Calef Brown called Dutch Sneakers and Flea Keepers. Though she has just turned two years old and is still learning to string together complete sentences, little K has memorized, in full, at least one of the 10-line poems in the collection, reciting it with pride in her linguistic accomplishment.

We started this book-based curriculum idea at Bella Mente with Carin Berger’s story, Forever Friends, a mixed-media illustrated story of friendship and the changing seasons from which emerged a lesson on the cardinal directions. We hadn’t intended on teaching this but the kids were so interested in the bird character flying south for the winter that we would have been foolish to neglect their enthusiasm to learn what we would likely have ended up teaching them eventually anyway. Our class was ready and eager to learn navigational skills then and there, thanks to this story, and so this was where we began our curriculum. Together we made compasses at the art table, hung direction signs in the classroom and practiced pointing to the west, east, south, and north walls of the room. The kids became bird watchers in the dramatic play area, listening to Stokes’ Field Guide bird sounds recording we borrowed from the library, and we used graph paper as the backdrop for our artwork, just like the artwork in the story. There was a little something for everyone in this book and the message of friendship helped reinforce the ever-important values of kindness and building lasting relationships.

While us teachers selected the first book, our lessons on paleontology and open-mindedness came from our class’s mutual love of Mercer Meyer’s fantasy story called How the Trollusk Got His Hat. So many kids had been requesting this book that we took their lead and built a curriculum around it, inviting kids at the art table to create their own fantasy creatures and making a batch of “tango playdough” to match the trollusk’s famed “tango soup.” The main character, Reggie was a paleontologist, so we set up an archeological dig in dramatic play and set out dino-bingo and non-fiction dinosaur books at the science table, which were a huge hit. Many conversations about how easy it is to misjudge a person because they look different resulted from the trollusk character’s frightful appearance, despite his kind and gentle nature. Though at first glance this is but a fun and silly story, we went on with it for weeks finding more and more to learn about together that we’d never have expected. The more we read this beloved tale, the more questions and ideas it inspired in both our students and teachers and soon another class was requesting the story for their curriculum when we finished. By the time we passed it along, our walls were adorned with imaginary letters to the trollusk and Reggie with hand-drawn stamps (the trollusk is a collector), pictures of dinosaurs to add to Reggie’s work, hand-created monsters and their descriptions, and all the kids wore giant paper hats that they learned to fold using an origami pattern.

We had so much fun exploring story after story, while seeking out others to complement the various components of our focal piece. We acted out the adventures together, made art in the style of the illustrations, and learned about the habitats and habits of the various creatures featured in each book. But it so much more than just fun and games, serious and meaningful learning was taking place every day and the students loved that the questions and ideas that they had after each reading inspired the activities and projects we would engage in as a class. Each story spoke differently to each child, stirring up a variety of emotions, questions, and thoughts. Everyone found some way to connect both with one another through their mutual interests inspired by the story, and with their own intellectual curiosities. For me, however, it was the thoughtful discussions resulting from our reading and analysis that I loved most. We asked the kids many thought-provoking questions based on each story and time and again the depth, wisdom, and maturity in their responses blew us away.

After reading Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius, my co-teacher, Becca, and I asked our group, “how might you make the world a better place, like Miss Rumphius did when she planted lupine flowers all over town?” Responses varied from giving lots of hugs, to drawing pictures for friends and family, to planting more flowers, to sharing toys with friends. One particularly thoughtful little guy who shared my love of literature decided he wanted to “give a flower to everyone everyone I see,” but then later on as our class had moved on from circle time and sat down to lunch, he was still thinking about the story and our question. “Miss Jo, I have another idea to make the world a better place,” my little friend shared, “I want to go to all the places in the world where people don’t have enough food and share my food with them.” A few tears well up in my eyes even now as I share his beautiful idea with you. I told him, “Caid, I hope that one day you get to do exactly that,” the pride beaming in his smile matched the pride I felt for him, as his teacher. Thanks to Caid, I fell in love with this story and share it with every child I can. K and I have already read it together a handful of times and each time we find something new and fall in love with the story all over again. 

So much wisdom can be found within the pages of just about any children’s book, and as a teacher, it’s nice to take part in the lessons and allow the story to do the teaching. I love reading stories with my kiddo friends and asking their thoughts and opinions, what they love about the book, and what interests them. I love sharing my take on the story too and through our dialogue about the book we begin to know and understand one another a little better. Our conversations about stories makes us equals, co-learners, as teachers in the Reggio Approach are intended to be, and they allow us to share in the beauty and joy of the written word and the artful illustrations and photographs that accompany each story. When I read with my students and ask them to tell me how the story inspires them, to share the thoughts and feelings the story evokes, it is as though we are just two friends deep in an authentic conversation. I listen to them, they listen to me and together we develop a deeper understanding of life. All the while these kids are practicing their critical thinking skills, building their vocabulary and ability to express themselves, they are learning new things about themselves and making connections they might have otherwise missed. There is no limit to what can be learned from a story when the power of literature is harnessed in the classroom and home. Here are a few of my favorite stories, I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.