Tag: preschool

Sloooooow down

July 31st, 2020

Mary Elizabeth, it’s a SNAIL. Come look at the SNAIL!!!

OH MY GOSH. I found a SLUG. You have to come look. Come loooook!

Come see come see, Mary Elizabeth! It’s a SLUG. NO – there’s another one. There are SO MANY SLUGS!!!

I found a SNAIL I found a SNAIL I found a SNAIL!!!

I hear these phrases. Every. Single Day.

Multiple times.

A while back, my preschool friends got really interested in slugs and snails. We learned that they like to eat leaves and they move using their one strong foot and slime. They’re called gastropods (meaning “stomach foot”) and they like damp weather. Also, they can drown.

The “learning” that surrounds slugs and snails might have ended…but we still have a tank of snails in our classroom and we still shout and scream about them every day. I could easily get annoyed by this. It happens so frequently…students in other classes have begun noticing and pointing out snails/slugs.

And I love it. There’s something magical about appreciating your surroundings. In order to really appreciate things, you have to slooow down. On one walk this week, we only saw a few slugs and snails. We realized that we had been moving too fast!

It’s easy to get into a rhythm and just let life, trails, slugs and snails pass you by. But I don’t want to be the person that’s too busy to notice all of the details…

I want to be the person that watches a butterfly sip pollen from some pink flowers and wonder if it will fly to the white flowers next.

I want to help half a dozen baby newts cross a busy trail on my way up to a summit.

I want to watch the horns on a slug bounce in and out as it senses its’ way up a tree, down a limb and across a leaf.

I want to wonder where the inchworm is going in such a hurry and whether or not it’s hungry.

I want to smell the change in elevation and notice the sounds that birds make in different seasons.

And I want to savor this summer. Despite the chaos and the unknowns and all of the challenges…the lessons you learn in the midst of that are always worth savoring.
It was today…

April 16th, 2020

April 15th. Vermont’s “stay at home” order was slated to end today. (Before that, the school closure order was scheduled to end on April 6th.) But five days ago, it was extended to May 15th.

I was just flipping through our school planner and dreaming about all the learning that was suppose to happen. We were going to get into gardening for G week and start keeping field journals during J week. This week was suppose to be K week. We hadn’t really fleshed out many plans for this week. My notes just say, “kites & wind, kiwis.” We could have tested different materials and methods for making kites, found the best spot on our school grounds, had flying contests, worked on our collaboration skills. And then, we would have eaten kiwi for snack.

And next week we would have talked about ways that we love the earth…L-week plus Earth Day.

But instead of doing those things, I’m reading about early childhood education and completing professional development and making videos where I read to guinea pigs. As amusing as all of that sounds, I’d rather be making kites and eating kiwis.

Tomorrow, I might make a kite just for the fun of it. I’ll pretend that it’s warmer than my Weather App says and I’ll sit outside to read about outdoor education. I’ll refresh my sourdough starter and prep it for a new adventure. I might have a FaceTime beer with friends.

And then the next day will resemble that…and so will the day after that and the day after that.

Eventually, things will change. It will be so warm that I don’t have to pretend it’s warm. I will share the excess of baked goods with random strangers. I can have a face-to-face beer. Preschoolers will make kites and they’ll garden and they’ll tell me stories about dragons and mice and time machines. They will be geniuses at hand-washing and we’ll go back to giving one another high-fives, playing “beauty shop” with my hair and forgetting to put the books back in the rack so that the spine faces the wall.

Until then? We take it a day at a time.
Natural

February 8th, 2020
I came to the end of Monday and realized that my day felt natural. It didn’t feel forced or coerced or unnecessarily stressful. It just felt like I was doing things that made sense for me…for my mind…for my heart. That feeling continued for the rest of the week…which was cut short by a snow day (that’s what happens when 1-2 inches of snow are predicted to fall every hour for an entire day).

A month into being in Vermont…and three weeks into this job, I’m still learning how it all fits together. But there’s a certain sense of gratitude that comes from feeling so settled. I’m not forcing who I am or what I do…I’m just doing something that comes naturally.

Stories come out of my back pocket and songs are sung as we walk down the street. We explore the woods and find fairy houses, collecting tools to build our own. We hike along trails and use our senses to decide what’s safe or unsafe. We make lists of A-words and then count our words and figure out what “27” looks like because we have 27 A-words. We learn sign language and sing songs that end with us spinning around and sitting down on sit spots. And then we talk about how we treat our friends and our books (what’s the spine of a book??). We stop everything to watch the snow fall and listen to woodpeckers and chase squirrels. And we might talk about math while we make zucchini bread. And one day, when I have a pencil perched behind my ear, a five-year old approaches me with a pencil of her own and says that she wants to wear a pencil behind her ear too…and she needs me to show her how to do it.

So today, when school was cancelled because of snow, I felt a little bit sad because of the missed adventures and stories and songs. Maybe I miss it just because it’s so new and fresh and exciting…but I prefer to think that I’ve found something that feeds my soul (at least for this season).