There's Something On Your Floor

Last night the yogi (who holds free sessions in my classroom) walked in and said, "There's something on your floor." He said it like some pieces of trash fell on the floor and randomly arranged themselves into geometrical figures. Nope, I'm just trying to address one of our math learning targets with good ole masking tape. I believe we are only responsible for teaching circle (the one shape I failed to create with tape), square and triangle, but I figured we might as well throw down a rectangle, diamond, trapezoid and hexagon since these shapes routinely crop up in our toys.

Anyway, I say "I believe" that is the learning target because when I arrived at the school, my curriculum was about three lines long that contained bullet points so random that more cohesion could have been achieved had the entries been picked out of a hat.

This was fine with me, since I don't like cookie-cutter themes (pumpkins in October, snowflakes in January). I mean, I don't like them anyway, but especially when we use northern hemisphere guides in Southern Africa (if it's gonna snow, it certainly won't snow in January). I don't like drilling animal sounds into kids' heads (Do pigs really say oink?! Really?!). Who decides three-year olds need to memorize made-up sounds of farm animals?

So last year, we did class projects on topics the children were interested in: insects, cars, ocean life, gardening and construction. And the literacy and math and motor skills fit in in the contexts of these explorations and the normal routine.

Then the Middle States Association scrutinized our school for accreditation and decided that we needed to rewrite the curriculum. So in a blur of head aches and more salt water than I'd like to admit, my colleagues and I pumped out a cumbersome, hurried document. And for the most part, it has been totally useless to me.

Now, in a more reflective and methodical way, we are rewriting the curriculum again, to make it something we (gasp!) actuall use! In fact, the students are going home early today to give us some more time for writing in the afternoon.

But for now, here's what we've been up to. After the children settled in, we did Around the World with Preschool, which involved jumping in paint and leaving our footprints on our home countries on the class map, Basotho dancing, Dutch Christmas cookies, Indian sweets, Chinese spring rolls, German songs and fairytales, Maori music, learning Swahili words, singing Woody Guthrie, making lots of flags and, as always, reading lots of books. We concluded by reading How to Make and Apple Pie and See the World, and of course made our own pie.

After that, we focused on feelings and emotions and I learned many interesting facts about my students, like Charlie gets sad when a dinosaur bites him and Isabella is happy when she smells cake. This sort of fizzled out, or rather became an on-going project and we are now becoming storytellers and puppeteers. In between donning sock and paper bag puppets on our hands and performing many an Eric Carle tale on a make-shift stage, we have been experimenting with color-mixing. I first tried to do this by dying water and oil (ex: making red water and blue oil). I figured when shaken together in a jar, the new color would form, and then the colors would separate out again so the children could repeatedly see how the primary colors combine to make other colors. This didn't work out so well because dyes that are soluble in water are not in oil. I tried several times, but all I succeeded in doing was coating my skin in yellow food coloring which made me look jaundiced. I settled for dealing only with colored water and have resigned myself to the fact that I will be mixing batch after batch of colored water until my little scientists get bored.

This, is necessary preparation for the annual tie-dye project, the day (when after a week of rubber-banding t-shirts) children squat around vats of steaming dye in their underwear, dipping in their white shirts to create hippie-esque materpieces and go home with their skin stained all the colors of the rainbow.