Start Ups

The 2-3s came roaring back to school all ready to go. What an amazing start it has been so far. 

Every year we are immediately caught up in preparations for our special 2-3-led Assembly on the Friday of our first full week of school. How to pull it all together as a team in such a short time frame? My years of doing this have taught me this most important fact: trust the children. 

Trust that their enthusiasm to lead this event will carry them through any nerves, fears, and the super-silliness that sometimes comes with the nerves and fears. Trust that if they are given choice about what they want to do--as long as it's realistic in our time frame--they will do their absolute best to pull it off. Trust that I need only to coach and facilitate because the children I am so lucky to teach are ready, even as we are only just starting up, to take on this big responsibility. And know that we are building our community and connections through this shared start up event.

We are now spending our time learning regular routines, tweaked each year as I grow and learn in my educating. I am getting to know my new students. I also see my returning 3rd graders with fresh eyes as the young make such dramatic leaps in the months that make up a summer. 

We have started up our Morning Work routine that Monday-Wednesday will be Word Work with the children deepening their understanding of spelling rules and phonics through hands-on practice. The Power of Flexibility kicks off our Thursday mornings with a curriculum that leads the children to investigate and test their ability to be flexible on academic, emotional, and social fronts. Kate Howe, an Averill Park speech therapist, and I have been working on this curriculum for three years. Kate will take the 3rd graders from last year's stopping off point while I will bring the 2nd graders through the curriculum from the beginning.

The children have been writing through assignments and their own creative projects. I have already had them getting used to composing rough drafts that are then transformed into final polished pieces--emphasizing craftmanship in both form and content. We have started up our reading lives in the 2-3s with discussions about "just right" books. This is a long discussion that will go on through mini-lessons over the next couple of weeks. 

At Parker, our first month and a half of school is spent slowly launching our work and going over expectations and routines for our social lives together. We have beautiful discussions about friendship and our responsibilities to the people we care about. We think about and act on how to take care of our classroom environment with daily jobs. We talk, always, about how to treat our beautiful land. 

Most importantly, we discuss the power of mistakes. That it is okay to mess up because each one of us is learning and we must allow for the inevitability of mistakes. From errors in our social and academic lives comes the most beautiful clarity about who we are now, what we currently know, and what we are still trying to master. Mistakes point us in the right direction way more effectively than a life led trying to be perfect. 

I couldn't hope for a more powerful start up to my school year with your precious children. I'll be back to report updates in this space.