Robin DeLamater

I began our Morning Meeting on Friday with a new song, “When Dogs Get Up in the Morning.”  The children had already been watching the wonderful show outside our window as trucks and trailers arrived to unload the animals with whom we would spend our day.  The song is a great one and you will hear the children singing it, changing the nouns to different animals and singing the sounds they make.  Xavier sang it throughout rest time, even creating a variation for cars–“vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom, That is what they say.”  We did a circle dance around our sun and sang, “The Earth Goes ’round the Sun.”  I moved to a discussion about things we love in the world as preparation for reading, “I Love You, Earth.”  Mrs. A’Hearn and I were the only people in the room who raised our hands in answer to the question, Who lives on Earth?  One child dismissed us saying, “I live in Dunkirk, not Earth.”  It’s an important reminder of the developmental realities of preschool thinking.  We smiled and continued our discussion that everything we named is on Earth with us (including Dunkirk and Maryland).

A few children were running around on the Meagher Courtyard waiting to enter the theater to see the 1st grade play on Thursday morning.  I cautioned them yet again about how it feels when you fall down on the hard patio.  The child seated next to me looked up and said, “It’s just like when something glass broke at home and Daddy said, ‘Are you kidding me?'”  Just when you think you’ve got it all worked out with your kids, there’s the sound of breaking glass.  “Are you kidding me?”

I’ve seen the looks on some of your faces these past few weeks as you drop off and pick up your children.  You know this feeling.  Christine A’Hearn and I looked at two boys at play just yesterday and exchanged an Amy Poehler “Really?” as we watched them begin to face off with two tree limbs three times their height.  “Are you kidding me?”  It’s April, surely we can relax a little bit, confident that our children have gotten the hang of it.  The frustration we feel as adults is often expressed in our culture that for every step we take forward, we take two backward.  What if we looked at it a little differently?  When I lived in Colorado, we all used a popular saying to describe the dramatic ups and downs of weather on the high plains and foothills:  “If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes.”  The currents keep shifting and it’s when you expect them NOT to shift that you set yourself up for frustration.  We’re taking a lot of deep breaths lately.  I’m reaching for my recorder to ‘Pied Piper’ our way out of situations in the classroom.  The children are constantly shifting.  They sing beautifully and they shove to be first at the door.  They build amazing bridges with arches and they cry if they don’t have all four rescue vehicles.  They draw and chat about a book we’ve been reading and they refuse to come to the snack table because they are cautious about the visitors in the room.  They are this and they are that.  They grow, they change, and I’m thinking perhaps it will always be this AND that.   Might it be true for us all?

We have been moving outdoors all around the campus building our vocabulary, awareness of space, ability to recall places–all foundational experiences for symbolic representation through maps.  Commands like “Meet me at the bench on the other side of Chaney Field,” “Go to the place where the first graders planted the potatoes,” and “Who can lead us to the weeping cherry tree?” are opportunities to move and be outside, yet are embedded with real information and present children with both the chance to utilize what they know and the expectation that they will find their way around the environment.  Playing in different spaces has a definite effect on the type of play, too.  Playing on the back hill and on the paths in the woods is exciting, a little scary, forces one to adapt to terrain, notice branches above, below, and beside, and inspires the imagination.  The boys have been crawling up and down the hill like Spiderman!  We count 1,2,3, Go! in as many languages as we can think of and run (or roll) down the hill together joyfully.

Irish Culture and Geography:  We started the year with movement to Irish music and have continued building our repertoire. Before the spring break, we located Ireland, an island, and noticed that on our Montessori globe it is red, which means it’s part of Europe (like Italy).  (Two of the children have drawn red islands in a sea of blue as part of their free drawing.)  We talked about the ways to get onto an island which is surrounded by water.  I introduced the people cards with an Irish boy and girl in traditional costumes named Danny and Caitlin.  We learned a cumulative song (keeps getting longer and longer) called “The Rattlin’ Bog.”  On Friday we walked to the sign which labels The Calverton School Cedar Bog, pointed out the words, then sang and danced on the sidewalk and pointed to the “branch on the limb, and the limb on the tree, and the tree in the bog, and the bog down in the valley-o.”  I have sung this song for over 20 years and this is the first time I ever got to sing it while standing next to an actual bog.  Do not discount the impact these things, which seem insignificant at best or irritating at worst to adults, have on small children.  They probably will say to people they meet in the future, “You mean your school didn’t have a bog?  How did you sing ‘The Rattlin’ Bog’ without a bog?”  We tasted Irish soda bread baked by Lisa Zecca.  Some of the children were visited by 1st grader Claire A’Hearn who put on her ghillies (soft leather shoes with laces) and showed us the Irish dancing she is learning.  Delilah got one of the Caitlin cards to show Claire that the shoes match.  I sang a lullaby (“Manx Lullaby”) as children passed around a baby, demonstrating how family members care for the young, and did  role-playing by choosing to be Uncle Danny, the sister Caitlin, Grandpa Danny or some other male or female family member.  (I have used these terms and children are now incorporating male and female into their vocabulary to describe people and animals.)

As you know, POWER is of huge interest to children.  I told a story back in February which demonstrated how one could use the POWER OF MATH, a story I created to help children solve problems.  I held a large piece of red paper and said, “MINE.”  They looked unhappy.  I told them I would use the POWER OF MATH to change something.  I took the paper, cut it in half and said, “MINE, YOURS” and handed the second piece to the child next to me.  I went on and on cutting my piece of paper saying, “MINE, YOURS” until each child had one.  The unhappy faces turned to smiles each time.  (No one said anything about the smaller and smaller sizes.  It didn’t matter.)  This past week I used the POWER OF MATH to change one pretzel rod into two, (or 4)…same with a string cheese…same with a clementine…same with a graham cracker.  A child said to me this week, “My mom has the POWER OF MATH.  She takes the jug of milk and pours a cup for me and one for Johann.”  Another said, “My mom has the POWER OF MATH.  She took a yogurt and said, ‘MINE.’  Then she opened it and spooned out some for me and some for her.”  Children said, “I have the POWER OF MATH” and broke a pretzel rod into smaller and smaller pieces.  They even tried to break a Goldfish cracker into “MINE, YOURS.”  This is powerful language, I think, and it leads to powerful thinking.