what’s a club?

It’s late spring, very late -  there are only a few weeks of school left. Once again I’m writing about card games. I love introducing playing cards to my preschoolers.  I have 4 games I usually teach preschoolers: “Concentration,” “Fish,” “War” (or Everlasting as my grandmother called it,) and “Crazy Eights.”   But I don’t really play pure versions of any of these games – as I alluded to in my entry last year.   In fact, I often invent versions on the spot – as was the case today.

I was reminded of this when my husband asked me about my day and I ended up telling him about playing cards with a small group of students.  Leopoldo was putting away the blocks and glancing over at Salomon and Valeriano playing in “the box. “  (Lately “the box” has become a place to play “doctor” and I’ve had to keep a close eye on the students who head there during free choice time.)  I decided to help these boys shift direction in a proactive way by inviting them to play cards.  I know from previous experience that my students will rarely resist an invitation to play cards; it was a sure-fire distraction.

I asked them if they wanted to play War or Crazy Eights; Leopoldo piped up and named the latter – probably because it was the last thing he heard. He told me he had never played cards before.

Dealing five cards to each boy, I showed them how to hold them in a fan.  I turned over the top card and we began playing the familiar game.   The difference is this, there were no crazy 8′s.  I just taught them how to make a decision about what to play based on whether they had a matching number or suit.  If they didn’t, they got 2 chances to choose a card before we moved on.  When we ran out of cards, we just kept going around to see who could play.  At some point Lila joined in and I just dealt her in with 5 cards.

It was fun and we played for a long time.  After about 3 rounds, the students were able to explain why they could or couldn’t play a particular card and I could prompt them to coach me about what I should play – which is the whole reason I love teaching and playing cards with kids.  There are so many hidden skills and I learned a lot about my 4 card-playing buddies today.

The “crazy” part of Crazy Eights can come later, these kids learned plenty today.

speech doubles

I’ve been spending time putting together my student portfolios and doing a bit of a memory walk. This slice is a reflection on another one of the delights of a preschooler – the way they work to make sense of words they don’t quite understand.

My preschoolers often don’t have the background knowledge or enough context to make sense of some of the words I use when teaching.  (What they think I’ve said sometimes makes more sense – as in the case of “wipe boards” instead of “white boards.”)  I understand their confusion and chuckle at the way they try to make syllables match what they think I have said.

My most recent example of this is “speech double.”  It is interesting to note they have chosen the word double instead of bubble.  I’m sure it is mostly a confusion of the “b” and “d” sound instead of a conflict with the idea of a bubble.   My students spent time in February putting together a story by beginning with some cut-outs of characters and adding a setting and then the speech bubbles.

I realize I probably didn’t describe these little circles in my drawings very well – because surely my students know what bubbles are and I should have been able to help them make the connection!  Chalk one up for being more diligent in my explanations!

As an adult with plenty of extraneous context to reference, I think describing those little circles with scratchy letters in them as speech “doubles” is pretty accurate.  Don’t they have wonderful stories!?!

one of the hidden lessons of preschool

“You have to have patience,” noted Salomon.
“Patience?  What’s patience?” asked Leopoldo.
“It’s being patient,” was Lila’s declaration.

(Preschoolers quickly learn new words and they even kind-of get the feelings behind the words – enough to use them correctly, most of the time.  But a definition, well, that might be stretching them a bit.)

All of that is beside the point. This year, my students have become particularly aware of waiting and talk about it often. So it has become a hidden lesson in my classroom – a lesson that my students are teaching each other without any help from me.

I don’t remember when the above conversation took place or what they were being patient for but I remember my eyebrows going up when I heard it.  “Mmmmm,” I thought, “this is going to be a good lesson to watch develop.”

Since then I have become acutely aware of when my students have to exercise patience because they talk about it.

Examples my students have noted:
waiting for plates and utensils to be passed out at meal times – then waiting for the food
waiting to be excused after breakfast and lunch
waiting for white boards and markers
waiting for our classroom opportunity to perform at the assembly
waiting for a turn to be Child-the-Week – a really, really big challenge to one’s ability to be patient!

And now we have caterpillars in our classroom and the conversation is about being patient for them to become pupa, (which just happened over the weekend.)  Now we’ll all have to wait for them to emerge as butterflies.

Do you pay attention to the hidden lessons in your classroom?  What are they?