It’s Teacher Feature Thursday!

This week we are featuring Laura Muniz. This three year old classroom was learning about Eric Carl and Laura decided to spend a week focusing on the animals featured in his books. Below you will find a reflection from Laura and images from her lesson.

What were your topics of exploration?

Some of Eric Carle’s books talk about animals, what they see and what they hear, so we decided to explore animal senses.  For this lesson we wanted to focus on snakes and how they use their tongues to smell.  We went to the Bone Hall at The National Museum of Natural History and checked out some cool snake bones.  We also read Eric Carle’s The Greedy Python.

What were your learning objectives? (What did you want your children to take away from the lesson?)

I wanted the children to learn that animals sometimes experience things differently than humans.  On this day, I wanted to emphasize the distinction between our sense of smell and taste and that of a snake’s.

What was most successful about your lesson?

I think the most successful part of the lesson was the game we played with the small jars with scented cotton balls inside. The kids took turns using their nose to smell, trying to guess what the “mystery scent” was.  They then stuck out their tongues, the way a snake would, to see if they could smell with their tongues.  The activity not only allowed the kids to engage with the lesson, it was also lots of fun!

What could you have done differently? What recommendations would you have for another teacher trying out this lesson?

We were talking about snakes, so naturally we went to the Bone Hall to check out some snakes and other reptile bones.  Unfortunately, the space in the Bone Hall is a little awkward because it is a popular thorough fare to other exhibits. I feel like I could have also done this lesson outdoors or even at the Zoo.

Here are a few images from their unit on snakes:

Laura began her lesson at the National Museum of Natural History. She read Eric Carle’s The Greedy Python and asked the group about what they knew about snakes. Laura then asked the group to compare the image of the snake in the book to the ones in the case explaining that we were seeing the skeleton of a snake.

Laura then asked the group what part of our body we use to smell. The group was quick to respond and Laura followed up by asking about the snake’s sense of smell. She explained that snakes use their tongues to taste the air around them instead of smelling with a nose.

Laura invited friends to try smelling the bottles first with their nose and then with their tongue.

Laura added the extra challenge of having the children try to guess the scent in the bottle. They had such a great time working together to try and figure out the scents!

Before heading back to the classroom, Laura invited the friends to take a closer look at the skeletons. They compare the different sizes of the snakes and their bones.

This class had a wonderful time learning about Eric Carle! Be sure to check back for our Teacher Feature next week!

Valentine’s Day

Here at SEEC we are often looking for new ways to approach the holidays. We never like to miss a teachable moment! Here are few lesson plan ideas from our classrooms to help take your Valentine’s Day beyond heart shaped treats and doilies.

Collage:

Have your group practice their scissor and folding skills by spending a few days on collage. Matisse and Bearden are two artists who have wonderful examples to share with the class. Having the children cut out hearts and work together to create a large class mural for their celebration is a great way to connect the topic to Valentine’s Day. 

Baking:

Baking or cooking are always popular activities for any age group and provide an excellent STEM connection. This group of toddlers mixed their ingredients in a plastic bag to help keep things contained and sanitary. It provided an excellent fine motor and sensory experience. Have your class cook up a treat for your Valentine’s day celebration or send them home as a gift to share with their families.

Red Exploration:

Red, Pink, and White are colors synonymous with Valentine’s Day. Spend some time going on a color hunt in your classroom or community and then return to your classroom to do some color sorting. You can have the children create artworks with only those colors or have some fun color mixing.

The Tin Man:

The Wizard of Oz is a beloved story at our school and the Tin Man is a great way to talk about the heart and emotions. Spend some time talking about why the Tin Man wanted a heart and talk about the ways your group might show their emotions to people close to them this Valentine’s Day. You can even take this lesson one step further and discuss material that the Tin Man was made out of and look for examples of it within your community.

Flowers:

Many of your children may give their adults flowers for the holiday. Why not spend some times learning about them? Try introducing the different parts of the flower and then heading out into the community on a flower hunt.

Hearts:

Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to talk about the human body. Give your group a chance to compare the shape of heart to that of an actual functioning heart. You can show them the different ways we can listen to our own hearts. This group even went to the museum to check out a heart rate monitor.  Communication:

Valentine’s Day celebrations involve the customary sharing of valentines. Extend this concept to communication and have your group write letters or postcards and actually send them in the mail. One class this year will be sending drawings and letters to a local hospital.

We hope you found some new ideas! Happy Valentine’s Day from all of us at SEEC!

Posted on behalf of SEEC teacher Carrie Heflin:

Hello Fellow Champions,

Whether you are a parent, grandparent, teacher, babysitter, or just an awesome person, you are reading this right now because you are a champion for the embattled cause close to all of our hearts- childhood. Day in and day out you find yourself concerned with nurturing the growth of another human being in a world that seems determined to fight you every step of the way. As a teacher preparing to enter my fourth year in a pre-k classroom, I just want to say that I know what you are feeling. I know that there are days when you feel utterly and completely defeated.

This is how I was beginning to feel every time I, as a classroom educator, had to mediate a forced apology between two or more of my students. Do you know what I mean by a forced apology? It’s what happens when Johnny knocks over little Suzie’s carefully-constructed block castle with his super-laser-rocket-robot feet and she yells, “Hey!” and shoves him into Tommy who falls and bumps his head. At this point, all three children are crying and screaming for justice and you get to take on the coveted role of apology-enforcer. Wrong has been done and the only way to make it right is to frog-march Johnny over to Suzie and coerce him into mumbling, “Sorry I broke your castle,” with liberal amounts of eye rolling. At which point Suzie must chime in with a completely unrepentant, “Sorry I pushed you,” and you are so tired from the twenty emotionally-trying minutes spent wringing these two “heartfelt” apologies out of Suzie and Johnny that Tommy, the innocent victim, has to make do with a back pat and you saying, “Sorry you got knocked over,” as you make your way away from the ticking time bomb that is Johnny and Suzie (who are both still angry at each other and currently plotting their revenge).

After three years of these incidents, I was beginning to lose hope. I had spent countless hours stewing about my inability to create an effective apology scenario in my classroom. I had tried every way I could to talk to my students through their disagreements in a way that would make them see the situation in a rational way, but the fact of the matter is that once a problem is already happening, both parties are too emotional to see reason. My co-teacher and I had done our research and we knew the problem. We were trying to force empathy on people who just hadn’t developed it yet. All the experts agreed. The children with whom we work are just too young to possess a developed sense of empathy. I suppose we could have just accepted that fact and moved on with business as usual, but the issue still rankled both of us. We knew that in today’s zero-tolerance-for-“violence” world, we were doing our children a disservice by continuing the forced apology routine. What was it teaching them? Did they really understand that hitting was wrong or did they just continue hitting with the understanding that a couple words makes it all better and then you can go back and do it again the next time you’re upset?

So we put our heads together and decided that we needed to make some changes. We knew that it wasn’t practical to expect our students to develop empathy overnight or to make them want to apologize just by using different words. The change had to be big. We wanted to do something that would help make our students more aware of the needs and feelings of others. That way, they might consider those needs and feelings more within the context of the choices they make. The result of this epiphany was a unit that we began in February and continued singularly for about a month and a half. The theme of the unit was, Heroism.

The foundation for the progression of our lesson plans was psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s Heroic Imagination Project. This is an initiative, created and implemented by Zimbardo, that claims it is possible to teach and learn heroism. There are three basic phases: 1) define heroism 2) explore examples of heroism and its obstacles 3) practice heroism in your daily life.

We used these principles in our lessons by first focusing on defining heroism (we talked about the difference between heroes and superheroes, the difference between being kind and being heroic, people who we think are heroes). Next we looked at some real life heroes. We visited exhibits featuring Nelson Mandela and Gandhi and brought police officers and EMT’s into the classroom to talk to the children. And we talked a lot about how it is often hard for heroes to be heroic, but they choose to do it anyway. When we talked about Mandela and Gandhi we looked at how hard it was for them to stand up against the governments with whom they disagreed. The kids were amazed that they were willing to give up their personal freedom to change something that wasn’t right.

The final step was practicing heroism in our own lives which we accomplished through a series of service learning projects. We wanted to make sure that all of the projects we undertook were actually heroic (as heroic as is possible in a pre-k classroom) rather than just kind, so we made sure there was an element of choice and sacrifice for the children in each task. One day we asked another class to leave for the playground without cleaning up their classroom. We told our class that they had to leave in a hurry and didn’t have time to clean. We showed them on a timer that they had 30 minutes of play time before lunch and that they could either stay in our room and play or use some of that time to go clean up the other classroom. Three quarters of the class went and cleaned the other classroom and they received individual thank-you notes from the other class. The rest of my students really regretted not going to help and the next time we had a project they were ready and willing to participate.

The next project involved giving back to the greater DC community. We did a lesson one day on a painting in the National Gallery of Art that tells the story of the Prophet Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath. In the story, Elijah is traveling through the town where the widow and her son live. He comes across mother and son and asks them if they have any food to spare a weary traveler. Even though she knows what it will mean for her and her child, the widow uses the last of her food supplies to make Elijah a loaf of bread. In return, Elijah blesses the widow with enough food to feed her and her son for the rest of their lives. My class struggled a lot with the context of this story. “Why didn’t she go to the store and get more bread,” they asked.
-Because she didn’t have any money with which to buy more food.
-“Why didn’t she go get money from her bank?”
-Because the bank doesn’t give you money for free. You have to put your money in and they hold onto it until you need it. She didn’t have any money to put in the bank. A lot of people don’t have any money to put in the bank.
-“How do they get food?”
-They don’t.

It was a hard lesson to hear and a hard lesson for me to teach. Afterward, my co-teacher and I knew it was time for our next project. The following week we told the kids that there was a special place in DC called Martha’s Table where you could take food for people who can’t afford to buy their own. “We have lots of food in our kitchen at my house,” one girl said. “I’ll bring some to school and we can send it to the Martha’s Table.” It was a sweet offer, but it didn’t require any heroic action on the part of our students and it didn’t teach them anything other than how to ask their parents for food- which was always available to them. So we told them to go ahead and bring some food from home to flesh out our donation and then we put our grand plan to a class vote. We told them that what we really wanted to do was to make sandwiches to take to Martha’s Table and that we wanted to use the sliced bread that was going to be delivered as a side dish for the children’s lunch the next day. The vote was unanimous. We used all of the bread that was delivered the next morning, made 30 sandwiches, loaded them in a wagon along with 50 additional pounds of food and took them on the metro to hand-deliver them to Martha’s Table. The kids were so proud of their work and I was so proud of their choice to take food that was meant for them and give it to someone who needed it more.

We got an overwhelming amount of positive feedback on the Martha’s Table project from the parents of our students. They told us how their kids talked about the project at home, how it really resonated with conversations about privilege that they had struggled to have with their children, and how grateful they were that we had taken the time to teach this important lesson. Heartened by these results, our class forged ahead with new projects. We were inspired by an elementary school class whose story we found online. They started a “Kindness Club” to send cards to people who were ill, hurt, suffering a loss, etc… Our first batch of cards went to the Children’s Hospital. The second batch was hand-delivered to the security staff in our building. After that, the students began bringing in their own requests. A cousin with a broken leg, a grandpa with a hurt shoulder, and a grandma recovering from surgery have all received cards so far.

Needless to say, things have changed in my classroom a little in the past few months. The kids are still kids. They have ego-centric disagreements and sometimes they get physical instead of using their words. What has changed is my response to these circumstances. When a child comes up to me screaming, “Miss Carrie she hit me,” I smile and turn to the offending party and say, “What would a hero do?” This one tiny question stops my students in their tracks. The other day I said it to a little girl who answered, “but I’m not a hero,” to which I responded, “but you could be.”

Sincerely,
A Happy Teacher