Life in Kindergarten

Oh, hi! Remember me? I’m the one who used to blog on a regular basis but became so lazy that I just started posting Currently entries, and even then, I stopped keeping up with that. Blogging was always so relaxing and therapeutic for me and I enjoyed browsing other people’s blogs to get great ideas to implement in my own classroom. These days I’m just so exhausted that I have found it hard to sit myself down and document what I’m doing with my class. I find this weird because it seems I had endless amounts of energy in my first year of teaching (when I taught Grade One) and usually your first year is the most exhausting; yet I find myself going to sleep earlier and earlier as the years go on.

Aside from exhaustion, another reason I haven’t blogged as much is because this year has been a little…all over the place. Back in November, I mentioned that I started this year in a Grade 3/4 LTO and was then moved to a permanent position at a different school teaching Kindergarten. As much as I love this new journey, I’m finding that FDK (Full Day Kindergarten) is a whole different world.

When I taught Grades 1, 3, and 4 in the last few years, I embraced the inquiry approach where I let the students steer the learning in our units. I still provided a lot of guidance along the way. The thing is, in those grades, the curriculum has very specific expectations. So even though there was an element of open-endedness, their inquiries were still very focused on expectations from given units.

It’s quite different in FDK. You can learn/teach just about anything you want. If the kids want to learn about dinosaurs, you guide their learning on dinosaurs. If they want to learn about insects, you gather materials and resources about insects. Inquiry “units” come directly from what they’re interested in learning. I use “” marks because it’s not like the Grade 1 unit on Seasons or the Grade 3 unit on Plants. It’s still a chunk of time you are spending learning about a specific topic, but I think we’re moving away from using the word “unit” when we’re talking about inquiry-based learning. It’s just a habit, I suppose.

In some ways, I’m a Type A personality. I’m an over-achiever, and I like things to be perfect. My paper work has always been thorough and updated to perfection (by my standards). If I ever go back to teach Grade One, I’m fairly confident my typed up unit plans would easily get me through another school year. If I’m being honest, I have struggled in this area the most in FDK. As I wait to see what the kids are interested in, I have NO IDEA what to do about my paper work. In the past, I knew as I was halfway through a unit what I would be teaching next, already typing up the unit plan and assembling resources. Now I find I’m waiting, sometimes feeling like I’m in Limbo waiting for my students to express a strong interest in something that we can use for an inquiry.

I entered Kindergarten Land on November 30, 2016. It was so close to Christmas that we just focused on fun holiday things and survived the Christmas crazed behaviour that comes with every child, despite the age and grade. When we returned in January, I was anxious because I had no clue what we’d be getting into. I was still getting to know these kids and it had been two weeks since I had seen them! They came back and were building lots of buildings with blocks during play time. I decided to give my first inquiry a go. We did an inquiry on Community.

We looked at community helpers, buildings, jobs, etc. We watched videos, read books, built mini towns, and incorporated math problems into our “theme”. But I still wasn’t convinced that this is what an FDK inquiry should look like and feel like. With my teaching evaluation approaching, I was starting to panic.

I killed some time (if you will) doing some explicit teaching on some literacy skills. I taught a unit on retells. We read lots of stories and I taught them how to write sentences (for some) and words (for others) about the beginning, middle, and end of a story. I was comfortable with this and I was proud of the writing I was beginning to see from such young children; but a unit like this wasn’t going to last long. I could see that the majority of the children were able to retell a story. I was going to have to move on soon.

Then one day it happened.

Every afternoon after lunch, the kids have open play. They can basically play with toys, draw, colour, read, whatever they wish and delve into their imaginative play. During this time, I pull kids in for guided reading (a great love of mine) and when I finish, I try to play with the kids for a few minutes and observe.

One day, a large group of them took a bunch of chairs and lined them up in rows on the carpet. They said they were on a plane. I boarded their plane and asked them where they were going. Some imagined they were going to Florida, others said Cuba, and one said Kitty Cat Land (a place I’d totally go if it was real). They began jumping off the chairs pretending they were parachuting. I was finally seeing the beginning stages of an inquiry.

I talked to my colleague/mentor after school that day and we talked about the different things we could do with this area of wonder. Take a look at where we went with our airplane inquiry.

We have a dramatic centre in our classroom and we turned it into an airplane. The kids painted a mural to show what they would see from a plane [art]. They had suitcases where they packed various things for their trips [drama], and they played together [social/emotional].

We used various materials to create our own planes. We learned that this style of plane is called a biplane because it has two wings [math & science].

These were a huge hit. We printed off pretend passports and the kids drew a picture and wrote down where they wanted to travel [literacy & art]. They used our class iPads to look up pictures of various destinations. This created a lot of conversation about weather and recreation [science].

 This little one is heading to Disney World

This JK saw the Statue of Liberty in New York

The kids were all about making paper airplanes. We taught them how to fold the paper and we raced them down the hall. We counted how many floor tiles each of their planes travelled [measurement] and graphed our data [data management]. We did this twice, the second time using a different kind of paper. We thought the construction paper would make the planes fly further, but it turned out we were wrong!

We decorated coffee filters to make little parachutes and dropped them from the top of the stairwell. We used a stopwatch to time them and graphed our times on a graph [art & data management].

At the onset of this inquiry, I began to jot down different topics we could get into regarding airplanes. Some topics were huge hits; others we never even got to. I finally saw what an inquiry was like. The excitement among the kids was wonderful to see and it was just as exciting to teach. As we continued to learn, we posted our observations on a bulletin board in our classroom. The kids noticed when something else was added, and I’m sure they felt a great sense of pride in their learning.

 Our airplane inquiry has come to a close and I find myself back in Limbo. But this time I’m not panicking. I’m using the time to do another explicitly taught unit on making predictions and a unit on subtraction in math. I’ve learned that this is okay and important to make time for. I think there needs to be a balance between inquiry and direct instruction. In a few weeks, we have an exciting project coming our way and I’m confident we will be able to launch another interesting inquiry.

Like all teachers, I am constantly learning. I can say that I don’t feel as confident as I have felt in other years teaching other grades, but perhaps this is a good and necessary step for me. Getting too comfortable isn’t always a good thing. I’m always on my toes, asking questions, and learning from my colleagues. Next week I am going to a workshop on inquiry-based learning so I can learn even more. I may be a teacher but I’m also a learner. I have a lot to learn about FDK and right now I am happy with how far I’ve come. There’s still a long way to go, but when I look at the successes I saw in the last few weeks, I’m confident our next inquiry will be just as exciting.

What are your areas of learning? Has anything shaken your confidence? What new learning have you embraced this year? I’d love to hear all about it.