A Morning at Preschool

It is 8:45AM on a Tuesday morning in early January, and in the JCC Early Childhood Center’s Kangaroo room, two four-year-old boys sit at a table collaborating on a complicated structure, while Natalie Wiesend, one of the teachers, sits and reads with three girls. A few more Kangaroos arrive; soon it will be Greeting Time, when the class will gather to talk about the day. Next door, at 9AM, the Giraffe Room begins their Greeting Time. With the final words of their greeting song – “Shalom, shalom, let’s have fun!” still hanging in the air, the children turn their attention to the whiteboard held by teacher Katy Czarnecki. “Who wants to tell us about today’s messages?” Hands go up as children tell Katy that “it’s Tuesday” and “we’re singing with Wendy today!” Across the hall in the Frog Room, children introduced themselves to a student who was new to the classroom.


As Greeting Time ended, children scattered to large tables for Small Group Time. In the Kangaroo Room, children in Nancy Witter’s group were wielding rolling pins as they flattened slices of bread to make roll-up sandwiches. Outside the Giraffe Room, Michelle Paris’ group was gathered around a large piece of butcher paper. Using toy cars and trays of different colored paint, children worked on mixing colors as they made designs using the car wheels. In the Frog Room, teacher Julie Bass and her small group read a book about dinosaurs as they continued their ongoing exploration of dinosaurs. Across the room Julie’s co-teacher Tonya Backstrom worked with her small group on how to represent clouds using different materials – crayons, white paint, and white paper – as a follow-up to a reading of It Looked Like Spilt Milk.

At snack time in the Kangaroo Room, a discussion broke out about how to eat your oatmeal. One child insisted to his classmates that “You can’t mix your chocolate chips into your oatmeal!” His declaration was met with cries of “yes you can!” and “Look – the chips melt when you mix them in!” The consensus was that you could choose to mix or not mix. As snack time came to a close in the Giraffe Room, it was time for the children to make their plans for Work Time. At Katy’s small group table each child took a turn “calling” Katy on a cell phone so that they could talk about what they wanted to do with their time. Plans in each classroom ranged from building a boat with blocks, to playing hopscotch, to dressing up and pretending to be a veterinarian, to reading with a teacher, to drawing a picture with crayons.

 

As Work Time got into full swing, children’s plans became intertwined, creating richer experiences. A boy who planned to play with animals and the girl who wanted to play veterinarian collaborated as they took care of a “sick” tiger. The hopscotch player recruited other children to her game. The boat builder was joined by others who brought tools to use and ideas of how the boat should look. The girl who planned to draw ended up creating an elaborate Hanukkah card for her parents. (Belated? Extremely early?) Two children who planned to build a train were joined by two more children who helped make the track longer and more elaborate. Teachers participated in these scenarios, taking on roles assigned by the children and following the themes in their play. In each room, one teacher was almost constantly surrounded by children supplying a seemingly endless series of books to read. In another, two children who were getting to know a new manipulative material received support from a teacher who helped them discover how pieces could fit together.


Soon, five-minute warnings that cleanup time was coming were heard. In one room, one of the teachers left the room to run an “errand, providing an opportunity for the ever-popular cleanup game, surprise the teacher. Could the children clean up before the teacher came back? Materials were put away quickly, as every shelf and bin is labeled with pictures and words. After everything was put away, the lights were turned off, and the children hid, silently. “Here she comes!” another teacher whispered. “Where did everyone go?” wondered the returning teacher. The class yelled, “Surprise!”

After cleanup in each classroom, the children returned to their tables to reflect on what they had accomplished during Work Time. At Natalie’s table children added blocks to the “Recall tower” as they recounted their activities, telling Natalie and their classmates about the materials they used, the structures they built, and the people they worked with. Soon, everyone lined up to go to Hootenanny! Other mornings might mean gym class or Israeli dancing, or Torah stories, but on Tuesdays for the twenty years, Wendy Lawrence has been singing with the children of the ECC. Soon all three preschool classrooms were singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain.”

After Hootenanny the children rushed back to their classrooms to put on all of their winter gear so that they could play in the snow. Outside, children slid down snow-covered slides, and rode sleds down the small hill on the playground. Teachers pulled other sleds full of children around the space. Red-cheeked and hungry, the children trooped back inside, stripped off snow pants and boots, and ate lunch. The morning was over.