“What is Mozart doing in his grave?”--The art of teaching kindergartners, yesterday and today:
“What is Mozart doing in his grave?” was the riddle asked our FUMC choir members at Lulu’s Ice Cream Parlor. The members were silent for a rare moment. Answer: “He is decomposing.”
Although a little inglorious, the answer to this grave question also describes what our kindergartners are doing today in their classrooms, according to Allison Backlund, who is currently beginning her fourth year teaching kindergarten at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Modesto. Exactly how much has changed about kindergarten from years past may be difficult to gauge, but dual interviews with Betty Bradbury and Allison may give food for thought.
“I wanted to be a librarian!
“I never wanted to become a teacher,” said Betty, referring to her days in college in the early 1950’s. “I wanted to be a librarian! It took five years of college to become a librarian, but four years to get a degree in early childhood development.”
So, because of the expense, Betty opted for childhood development. Her degree from the University of Maine, coupled with a degree in motherhood, established a basis for a successful career later in life: when Betty retired in 2013, she had been helping kindergarten teachers become better teachers, in the IMPACT program for Stanislaus County for 13 years, after 18 years teaching kindergarten.
Betty’s career actually began when she was living in Arkansas in the 1970’s. “Let’s start a nursery school,” she said to a friend, and they created a nursery school in a Quonset hut at the base where her husband Gordon was stationed. Teaching nursery school “wasn’t too bad.”
A few years later, they were living in California. “I had three kids in college. I tried teaching junior high. That was the worst year of my life!” Getting a job teaching in the late 1970’s in California was almost impossible, but “Ed Wheeler was city manager in Newman and he took me out to lunch with the Superintendent of Schools.” There was an opening at Bonita at Crows Landing! “I kind of lied and said I could speak Spanish. We’d been to Puerto Rico!” Betty got the job.
“I couldn’t have gotten a better fit, a better school. Nobody told me what to do. The sky was the limit. My whole teaching career would have been different if I’d been in a larger school where other kindergarten teachers would tell me what to do. I could use whatever I saw worked. I used part of the school’s curriculum. I went to conferences. I just used whatever I thought would be good for kids.”
“I like to watch their minds, how they think and put things together.”
In some ways, Allison is in stark contrast to Betty: “I decided to be a teacher at a pretty young age. My mom was a teacher. Adults would ask me what do you want to be. The answer never changed, always a teacher.”
Allison started college at Sacramento State, intending to become a high school history teacher. Then, in her sophomore year, she started teaching gymnastics, using her experience from “10-ish years” doing all “four areas: bars, vaults, floor, and beam.” The younger age appealed to Allison, and she “decided to do elementary education.”
It is evident that Allison enjoys her job as much as Betty did. “I love working with the kids. I like to watch their minds, how they think and put things together.” However, her teaching situation at Woodrow Elementary School in Modesto differs from what Betty experienced at Bonita. Allison’s school has three kindergarten teachers, who teach about 75 children. The kindergarten teachers meet every Wednesday with the 1st and 2nd grade teachers in their PLC (Professional Learning Community), to be sure they are aligning their teaching with the Common Core objectives. Although there is some freedom to adapt, the teachers are expected to utilize to the district-adopted program, “Benchmark Advance.”
Allison team-teaches with another kindergarten teacher. She is the aide for her partner’s 24 students from 7:45 to 11:05; then, when Allison’s students arrive, they switch roles from 10:27 – 2:00, with a slight overlap for the presentation of “bigger concepts, comprehensive skills.” They read aloud stories, like “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “Who’s in the Shed,” from “Big Books,” which are about two feet tall so fifty children can see the pictures at once. The children are led to analyze such things as character and setting, in this large group segment of the day.
“They would just copy my line exactly, so there was no learning.”
While at least 92 languages are spoken by the children who attend public school in California, Betty’s students were somewhat homogeneous: 45 to 55% entered kindergarten speaking only Spanish; the others could speak English. Her first year, Betty noticed that many of her Spanish-speaking students derived no meaning from the material that her district had purchased. “I was doing the phonics program [where the students were expected to go through certain motions, to demonstrate that they were understanding]. The kids were watching me, where I was drawing my lines. They would just copy my line exactly, so there was no learning.”
Betty addressed the bilingual nature of her student body by publishing a daily newspaper, English on one side, a Spanish translation on the other side. Each day after the children left, Betty would write the English version of tomorrow’s newspaper, then her own translation into Spanish, for the reverse side. “Mercy, my aide, would come in after school and correct my Spanish on the newspaper so I could print it off before I left in the afternoon.”
Part of the newspaper might treat the knowledge of colors, using sentences built from what students had worn the previous day: “John has on a ____ shirt.” The students would have to fill in the blank. True observations appeared in print about various students. They would read the newspaper together out loud. “When they came to a sentence like ‘Suzy lost her tooth yesterday,’ we would ask, ‘Suzy, what color do you want us to circle your name with?’” As they read together, there might be a certain task, like “’Every time you see the word the, circle it in brown.’ I taught them a bunch of sight words that way.” Later, when Betty was training at the district level, she said, “I kept telling the teachers I worked with, ‘If you knew that the Modesto Bee was the only place where your name was written [for the public to see], you’d drive to Modesto to get your newspaper.’”
“I developed the Fruity Freida Phonics program especially for my Spanish speakers. Every picture in FFP began with the same sound in both languages and the artwork was done by one of my parents who was an accomplished artist. We had a jingle the kids sang.
I was blessed with an amazing amount of parent help, both the English and Spanish parents. With such a small school all the teachers worked closely together and if there was something the first grade teacher thought needed to be addressed, it happened. That continued up the line.
“Children who didn’t get their work done worked with their teachers at recess. All of which is illegal now! In most of the years I taught there, our scores were third in the district even though 85% of our children qualified for reduced or free lunches and half entered speaking only Spanish. A small school is gold. A small school with committed teachers is even shinier.”
The Demands of the Present Day
A personality centered, bilingual newspaper might be a difficult vehicle to deliver the recent Common Core curriculum in a team-teaching situation such as Allison’s. Besides having to integrate her teaching with the other teachers at her site, today’s expectations involve computers. “We’re moving to online assessment. It’s tricky, trying to figure out how that works with kindergartners.”
Although the students in California are not officially tested until third grade, Allison is preparing even kindergartners for what’s to come. “The computer reads them a story. Then they are asked questions like ‘What was the setting? How did the character feel? Which word is cat? Can you find the sight word the?’”
Allison’s school is composed of students of “mixed ethnicity,” rather than the relatively bi-lingual bi-cultural make-up of Betty’s clientele. There is no instruction in cursive writing, but there is writing with hands, using capital and lowercase lettering. First grade begins keyboarding.
Betty’s observation was that elementary school teachers by 2013 seemed “regimented.” Allison’s kindergartners begin their year as anything but regimented: “Some have been to school, and that some have not.” These five-year-olds will soon be working with skills such as “retelling” the story, comparing and contrasting using Venn diagrams, analyzing character and emotions using text-based evidence. They will learn “place values” (e.g. the value of the 1 and of the 3 in the numeral 13), as well as classification.
To try to appreciate the philosophy of the Common Core, which has been adopted by 41 of the 50 states, we can think about one of the examples of a classification question that Allison provided: Which of the following pairs belong together: sock/backpack or flower/watering can? HINT: Probably the best answer is flower/watering can, but . . . ?
The Common Core philosophy probably would accept either answer, depending upon the logical integrity of the student’s rationale for making the choice. A student who could give no reason for choosing the flower/can choice might get less credit than the one who could defend the sock/backpack choice by explaining that somebody going on a backpack trip might put socks into the backpack. It might seem apparent to many of us that a watering can can be used to water flowers, but the emphasis of Common Core is upon reasoning rather than on simply culturally conventional “facts.”
So, what is “decomposing,” if you’re not a musical corpse?
Two of the five “domains” specified by Common Core for kindergartners are Counting and Cardinality and Operations and Algebraic Thinking. The first domain probably feels familiar to most of us who attended kindergarten, if we are over the age of thirty. Betty used “touch-point math,” which involved a number line at the top of the paper, which they could touch. “By the end of the year, kids could add up to 20.”
More in line with algebraic thinking, Allison and her fellow kindergarten teachers present the idea of “number bonds.” A number is introduced, such as “5,” and students place the numeral into a large circle, with two arms attached to two smaller circles below. The large circle represents “whole,” and the two smaller circles “parts.” For example, the whole number 5, could be written with a 1 and a 4 below it. This process is called “decomposing.” Later, the graphic display is followed by the algebraic, sequential display: 1+4=5. They generally spend two days practicing to decompose each number, and keep practicing throughout the year.
Students are presented with such concepts during whole group instruction. “Our carpet is our desks,” and there are 26 spots on the floor, one for each of the letters in the English alphabet. Whole group instruction, at the beginning of each day, lasts a half hour, and soon at least four major areas are addressed: letters, numbers, shapes, and colors. By second semester, the students rotate, after whole group instruction, through eight centers, two each day. Sight words, reading CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant), decomposing, addition, and subtraction are addressed second semester.
Allison’s classroom embodies more than the abstraction that underlies the Common Core curriculum. Allison, had originally been an American history major, because she “liked the way one of [her] history professors taught . . . more like a story.” Even though her students are young, the sense of history comes, a little. “We talk about the history of Thanksgiving. We talk about technology, how it’s changed from the past. Having ice boxes, no electricity. Having bartering. We’ll act out bartering: ‘You gave me a crayon, so I’ll give you a marker.’” Allison’s students do some journal writing, and there is an art center. “I try to include art. It’s good for fine motor skills. And movement!”
Change . . . ?
How kindergarten and kindergartners have changed in the last forty years seems un-measurable, but we may close with some similarities and differences between Allison and Betty’s statements about kindergarten in general.
Are kindergartners different from other age groups? Allison said, “No, they all go to school. All ages have to learn aspects of how to be at school. “Betty might not disagree, but she said, “With kindergartners, you have a clean slate; you can set up your own rules. I had them sit in a “U,” one Hispanic child, one English-speaking, so I wouldn’t have to worry about them talking to each other.”
Both teachers marveled at how much their students had changed from the beginning of the year to the end. Kindergartners change “drastically!” At the beginning of the year they are learning letters, but by the end they are sounding out words to read short stories. Betty’s greatest pleasure in teaching was “seeing what they come in with in September and what they can do when they leave. I wanted kids to love school, when they left. I remember one child told me a few years later, Mrs. Bradbury, I will remember you till I’m older than dirt!”
As to the concept of childhood changing in America over the years, Betty remarked, “Kids used to be independent. You just went out and roller skated. Parents weren’t watching you like hawks. Kids had more freedom—time to be creative. Kids didn’t have the stuff. Now, they’re all on the I-Pad.”