The Point Of Stone Soup Is We Make It Together

The bulk of our classroom day is taken up with free play, either inside the classroom, outside, or in the gym, and that’s exactly as it should be for preschoolers. There are two parts of the day-to-day curriculum, however, where we expect the children to toss their own desires and interests into the stone soup being cooked up by a larger community: Circle Time and Small Group.

Circle Time is when we all come together around a single big urn. The younger children mostly sing, dance and read books together. It makes for a delicious, predictable broth, which is just the kind of thing 2-year-olds go for. We could sing the same songs over and over throughout the year and they would push away from the table full and satisfied every time.

In our multi-aged 3-5’s class, we still have many younger children who would be satisfied with the good, old familiar potage, but they’re sharing cooking duties with four and five-year-olds who have developed a taste for something with a little more kick. Conversation is an amazing spice, but one that’s unpredictable, and can be easily overused. The resulting soup is sometimes a delight, but just as often it’s a bland mash or an overwhelming, eye-watering gumbo into which each cook has added his own dash of Tabasco without tasting first to see if it’s needed. It often takes several months of experimenting to get it right, but that’s the only way to learn to make Circle Time soup together.

Our Small Group Activities are when we retreat into four separate kitchens with a handful of buddies and cook something up on our own under the guidance of a parent. Our 3-5’s class has been doing this since day one, while it’s a part of the Pre-3 curriculum that we’ll add shortly after the winter break. This can be anything that might be of interest to a group of 5-6 preschoolers: a collection of kitchen tools, a board game, planting seeds, a science experiment. In other words, parents are responsible for the “stone” that will form the basis of the soup the kids are going to make together that day.

My favorite part of the being a parent at the Latona 3-5’s Cooperative Preschool was the days when I was responsible for a small group activity. One of my earliest classroom lessons, however, was that while I might be the one providing the stone, and maybe even the kettle, it was not my job to bring in the recipe.

One time, following up on the tip from Teacher Chris to bring in something of interest to me, I thought I’d lead the kids through an examination of how books are made. I have a huge library of hardback books and had spent time learning about how they’re made, so I brought in a collection of different types of books (paperback, hardback, leather bound, etc.), a junker book, and a box cutter. The idea was to let them look at the books for a couple minutes, then break out the box cutter to perform the sacrilege (little did I know what I would later be doing to books) of cutting the junker apart to examine how the binding is attached, signatures are assembled, and the invisible role sewing plays in traditional bookbinding.

It went smoothly, I was holding the kids’ interests, and they were clearly excited by the prospect of a “super sharp knife” being present in the classroom. It was at this point that Teacher Chris stopped by our table to see what was going on. Her presence reminded me of the guideline to let the children get their hands on things, so I started carefully separating the signatures and handing them out to the children to examine. That’s when it all went horribly wrong. The children, in a joyful frenzy, set about tearing what was left of the book into tiny pieces.

My educational consommé had turned in a moment into a food fight of that consisted, of all things, in ripping a book to shreds. Making it worse, was that it was happening under the nose of Teacher Chris. I’ll never forget her calm smile as she looked me in the eye and said, “The children have made your activity their own.”

As a teacher, I have bad days and good. When I examine what went wrong on the bad days it almost always comes down to the fact that I came into class with my own “recipe” and clung to it even when the children clearly wanted to try a different one. Rather than helping the kids "make it their own," I’ve doggedly tried to control and manipulate them into sticking to the instructions. The best days are the ones when I remember that it’s all about stone soup.

It’s not always possible in our day-to-day lives, to set aside our agendas in favor of those of our children. We have things we must get done, we have schedules to meet, and we need our children to behave in certain ways in order to make it happen. But I'd also like to point out that every conflict we have with our children (or anyone else for that matter) is a conflict over agendas. In the midst of the rush and crush, however, it’s important strive to keep the principles of free play alive, and to remember that our children need the experience of making community or family activities their own, and that can only happen when we agree to put down our recipes and allow them to wear the chef's hat for awhile.

Sometimes the results are revelation, like the time this summer when Amanda helped her son Thomas achieve his vision of bacon cupcakes (at least, I hear, Thomas liked them). And sometimes they're awful, like when she helped him add mint cream cheese frosting.

The point of stone soup isn’t that it’s always delicious. The point of stone soup is that we make it together.

Rain Makes Everything More Fun

After an unprecedented four solid months of warm (sometimes hot) sunny weather, the famous Pacific Northwest rain returned this week. I don’t think we’ve ever gone this far into the school year without opening our gym during “outside time,” and I’ve been holding off as long as I could, but we broke the seal for the 3-5 class on Wednesday and the Pre-3’s on Friday.

As the kids finished up their small group activities and snacks I stood in the hallway separating the gym and our courtyard saying, “You may play inside or outside.” Each of the children, in turn would look first at this (excuse the photo quality – these are telephone snapshots):

Then at this, an option they haven’t had this year:

Novelty and dryness won out in almost every case. This is what one would expect. But I’m a hardcore believer in children playing outside. And if northwest kids don’t learn to play in the rain, they’re going to be cooped up for 9 months of every year. So, naturally, I had a plan . . .

First off I deployed my new pro-rain propaganda mantra, “Rain makes everything more fun,” which I’ve been repeating to the children since Monday, injecting it into any conversation involving weather. I started using it on Monday, especially with the Pre-K kids by way of preparing them for the fact that we were going on a neighborhood fall leaf hunt on Tuesday afternoon, rain or shine. I liked it so much I shared it with my Pre-3 friends on Tuesday morning, then just kept repeating it throughout the week.

The second piece of my plan to counteract the lure of new (to them), colorful, dry plastic things were piles of fall leaves.

The third element of my master strategy were puddles! Our uneven, cracked asphalt courtyard surface is perfect for collecting rainwater into wonderfully stomp-able pools.

I felt that this would be enough, but like any good Machiavellian, I held two things in reserve. The first was the knowledge that our rain barrel was now, finally, full again. The second was a bucket of sidewalk chalk that had been sitting out in the rain all morning.

On Wednesday, after a few minutes of indoor play, I announced to those within ear shot, “It’s time for the leaf party,” threw the bag of leaves over my shoulder and headed out into the deluge. I waited in the rain as a few kids ran to get their coats. The initial leaf party gang was 3 hearty souls – Thomas, Finn V., and Katherine. They arranged themselves in a group as I shook the leaves over their heads. By the time we were done, several other children had discovered the scene and wanted to be apart of it, so we began scooping leaves off the ground and tossing them into the air. Once they were wound up enough to make it their own activity, I rushed inside and made a show of looking out the window, “Hey, I see kids having a leaf party out there!” I was joined at the window by several children. I then announced, “I’m going to be in the leaf party too!”

Within a few minutes a handful of other kids had moved on to the outdoors, which lead to the natural discovery of the puddles. Then I heard the cry, “There’s water!” Someone had figured out that the rain barrel was re-charged and ready for action. Thomas said, “This is a perfect day for mud soup.”

By the end of our outside time there were only 2 children in the gym.

Yesterday, the Pre-3’s were confronted by an even heavier rain. As I set up, however, I realized that it was still relatively warm, so I decided to go without a coat, saying to myself, “Rain makes everything more fun.”

Just as with the older kids, most of the two-year-olds initially chose the shelter and newness of the gym, but more of them dismissed the inside right from the start. Twos are notorious for their love of puddles, so I held the leaves in reserve as Aedan, Jasper, and Ava tried out their rain boots, and Sylvia conducted the experiment of puddle jumping while wearing Crocs with socks. Before long we had a nice gang of rain-players, most of whom, like me, were enjoying the weather sans rain gear.

The first leaf party attendees were Violet, Owen, Aedan, and Jody, all of whom beamed giddily into one another’s faces as the leaves rained down upon their heads. I loved watching them connect with one another through their mutual excitement, jumping up and down, then gathering handfuls of leaves to toss into the air.

That’s all that was needed to get the Pre-3’s going. We never had as many of the kids outside at one time as the 3-5 class, but the ones who did play in the rain wound up doing the same things they would have done in the sun. They shot baskets, dug with shovels, and even got their bottoms soaking wet riding the unicycle merry-go-round and sliding down the big slide.

And I still had wet chalk in reserve. My devious plan had worked. Woo hoo! Rain makes everything more fun.

Someday We’ll All Be Farmers

Like most preschools, it seems, our first field trip of the year was to a “pumpkin patch.” It’s in quotation marks because we’re an urban preschool and actual pumpkin patches are a little out of our reach geographically. For the past couple years, we have made the longer trek to an actual pumpkin patch where we cut the squash from their vines, but given the logistics of hauling 20+ kids into the countryside in a world of economic and environmental considerations we stayed closer to home this year.

Thomas is probably the only kid who missed the slightly more authentic experience – he’d been looking forward to using a pair of “loppers” on a pumpkin vine, a dearth we will more than make up for next week at school when I bring my own loppers in for the kids to try out. The huge cedars in my front yard have dropped lots of twiggy parts lately, so we’ll have plenty of disposable lopping material at hand.

In fact, from a child’s perspective, yesterday’s was a perfect preschool field trip. Our guide, Farmer Adam, understood his age group. The farm animals looked well cared for, and the one-day old piglets were a treat. We got to touch the pygmy goats (Maya posted some cute photos of them over at Crumbs & Quibbles). The entire operation is compact enough that weary legs weren’t a problem. And, at the end, there was a grassy field dotted with child-sized pumpkins to take home.

In other words there was a ton of material to bring back into class, which is one of the main purposes of a good field trip. Next week we’ll try to “extend” this shared experience in more ways than just bringing in my loppers. For one thing, we’ll be visited by Old Bessie, a cow made from a pair of saw horses, a 2 X 4, and a paper mache head. We’ll hang latex glove udders full of water from her belly so the kids can “milk” her through tiny pinprick holes in the finger tips. We’ll also construct a “hay maze” from gym mats stood on end. At Circle Time, we’ll compose our own song about our favorite parts of the field trip, and of course, sing a little “Old McDonald Had A Farm” because it’s fun to make animal noises. And, finally, we’ll continue our exploration of pumpkins, 10 of which have been living with us in the classroom for the past week.

Yesterday I ran into Teacher Matt who, like me, was wearing his safety backpack while chaperoning his 3-5 preschool class on a pumpkin patch field trip. We’re all out there taking our kids out to see the pumpkins. In fact, my informal survey of the children found that more than half have either already been to a pumpkin patch/farm with their families or are planning an excursion. It’s an annual rite that may be more widely shared among this generation than cutting their own Christmas trees, dying eggs, or eating turkey and cranberry sauce sandwiches on the day after Thanksgiving.

Growing up, there are few memories more vivid than those of our family summer vacations to my own aunts’ and uncles’ farms on the Kansas-Nebraska border, where we fed the pigs, collected the eggs, and drove the tractors. Today, they still farm that land, but they are almost a novelty these days as family farms have been consumed by giant agribusinesses that operate more like factories. I would never want to take a group of preschoolers to see a real farm today. I think it would scare them.

For much of the country, places like the Fairbank Animal Farm represent an American ideal that has already more or less faded into the realm of legend and myth.

But there are glimmers of revival, at least here in Seattle. Weekly farmer’s markets have sprung up in nearly every neighborhood, where local produce growers sell to their neighbors. Many of these “farms” are in backyards and pea patches. Most of them seem to be operated by recent immigrants. Several of our preschool families are raising their own chickens and most had robust vegetable gardens this summer. I don’t know if it’s the economy, a reaction against corporate food manufacturing, health concerns, or a combination of all three, but people aren’t ready to leave the soil. It feels like a kind of quiet revolution.

Maybe in the future we’ll all be farmers and the field trip to a pumpkin patch will just be a tour of our own backyard.

A Full Body Sensory Experience

When it comes to preschool art, our rule of thumb is that it’s the teacher's job to provide a certain collection of art supplies each day, but how the children choose to use them – as long as they’re not hurting or frightening someone else – is up to them. Last year, for instance, in the 3-5 class we had a group of girls who turned every art project possible into finger painting, which became an excuse to apply paint, glue, paper mache paste, or any other substance from their fingertips to their elbows. They often produced no actual paintings to take home, but rather temporary body art to wash off before moving on to the next station.

A few years back the father of one of our students was a rather notorious artist. Not only did Peter fully understand the theory of the art station, I soon realized that he was applying the same principle to every station in the room. And not only was he encouraging the children to use the materials as they choose, he himself was finding new and startling ways to use what I’d provided. I learned to especially look forward to when it was his turn to be in charge of the block area.

Our block area is the largest open space within the classroom; it doubles as our Circle Time venue. Whenever I saw Peter was to be working that station I started just tossing out a collection of random items to see what would happen. This wasn’t a secret. I told him what I was doing. One day I gave him the challenge of gym mats and several large wooden boxes along with a few other randomly selected items. The area went through several iterations, one of which included using the ability of the mats to be connected to one another by means of Velcro strips to wrap large numbers of children together like meat in a burrito. Ultimately, however, the most successful result was when the boxes wound up under the mats to create an ever-changing soft landscape over which the children leapt, fell, and tumbled.

Needless to say it got wild and sweaty. Kids weren’t always landing on the mats, there were several head-bonking collisions, and more than a few twisted limbs, although surprisingly few tears. I guess it was too much fun to take the time out for crying. There were a lot of kids rubbing it off and jumping right back in.

In the midst of this scene, our parent educator Jean Ward walked in. I gulped, wondering what she would say. She stood watching the kids buffeting themselves and one another for a while. Finally she said, “This is terrific. The children are getting a full body sensory experience.”

This block area set-up is now a staple of Woodland Park’s curriculum. Since not all parents have the ability or desire to perform the ongoing construction and de-construction that Peter did, it has lost its “every-changing” quality. I’ve also taken to using duct tape to hold the wooden boxes together so they don’t slide out from under the mats. And this week, I threw some of our new giant soft blocks into the mix for both extra padding and fun. But it still maintains much of the crazy-time fun of the original.

Both the Pre-3 class and 3-5’s played on the soft landscape set-up this week, and while there were a few bumps and bruises, I don’t believe there were any more injuries than on a usual day – preschoolers can get bumps and bruises doing just about anything. It’s a fantastic place to experience things like body space, being gentle/careful with the bodies of others, taking turns, and being responsible for one’s own safety. A few children always lose themselves a bit and engage in spontaneous wrestling or tackling. I tend to let a little of it go as long as both parties are enjoying it, but that’s not always the case, so I’m constantly reminding the kids, “If someone is doing something to you that you don’t like, you can say, Stop!” A lot of children said “Stop!” this week, especially yesterday in the 3-5 class, and just as many children got the message and stopped doing whatever it was that was infringing upon their friend’s enjoyment of school.

I’m always amazed at how well this set-up works. It’s hard sometimes for the parent in charge of that station to step back and let the kids take a few chances, because it is so manifest to our adult brains how easily they could be hurt. (And sure, sometimes we have to make a safety rule when someone insists on repeatedly attempting some risky maneuver.) If it were us, with our much more fragile adult bodies, we would certainly emerge from this experience with wrenched necks and twisted ankles galore. But children, with their extraordinary flexibility, low center of gravity, and undeveloped knee caps, have bodies designed for the rigors of the soft playscape and it's "full body sensory experience."

At one point yesterday Finn V. found himself buried under a pile of bodies. I was keeping an eye on things as they developed, watching his face for any sign of pain or panic. His face was flushed with excitement. At one point, even though he was smiling from ear-to-ear, I got concerned and asked, "Are you okay?" He answered, "Yes. I'm under a blanket of kids!"

In The Bizarro World Hugs Flow Like Water

Holy cow, I love the Pre-3 Circle Time.

I start with a song that 2-year-olds find hilarious. I sing:

I’ve been waiting for you to come to this place.
I’ve been waiting for you to come to this place.
Where ever you’re from
I’m glad that you’ve come
I’ve been waiting for . . .

You and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you to come to this place.

This song goes on to remind the children of the things they did that day, but it’s always the chorus of “you and you and you and you . . .” that seals the deal. They think its funny when I point at each of them in a rapid-fire motion and many children point back at me. Some of them literally roll on the floor in laughter.

We then launch into 2-3 large motor songs, like:

I’m gonna shake, shake, shake my sillies out. (We shake our arms.)
Shake, shake, shake my sillies out
Shake, shake, shake my sillies out and wiggle my waggles away.

I’m gonna clap, clap, clap my crazies out . . .

I’m gonna jump, jump, jump my jigglies out . . .

I’m gonna yawn, yawn, yawn my sleepies out . . . (We lie down on the floor.)

I’m gonna shake, shake, shake my sillies out . . .

By now they’re focused so I get them on their bottoms and we go through the day’s featured songs, which currently are our Halloween songs. Like with most of the songs we sing at Woodland Park, they’re a hodge-podge of my own loose interpretations of what I’ve learned from other people.

We tend to stay in a seated position and do a lot with our voices, hands and expressions during this portion of the program, which can be a challenge for the guys who like to be moving their whole bodies. This year it also seems to be viewed as a time during which Teacher Tom is easily accessible, which has resulted in a wonderful outpouring of spontaneous, mid-song hugs and affection. Yesterday was a perfect little love-in.

Circle Time started with Oliver attempting to snuggle with me as I sang the greeting song. During our Halloween songs, Violet was the first to come forward to hug me, but it was Miriam who was alive with love. She must have hugged me a half dozen times during that ten minutes of singing, interspersing herself with her friends, culminating in Aedan sweetly laying his cheek against my knee in the warmest armless hug imaginable. What worked is that the kids intuitively took turns, coming to the front of the room to hug me one at a time, which allowed the group singing to go on unabated. It’s the kind of behavior that can get out of control and need to be curtailed, but yesterday it just flowed like water. And when it’s flowing I’m not going to be a stickler for protocol.

I like to finish with the felt board, which is pretty reliable for regaining any attention we lose during the seated songs. Yesterday, it had the added effect of creating a bit of barrier between me and the children, stemming the tide of mid-song huggers. But that was only temporary because everyone knows what happens after we sing:

Boom boom
See ya later
Later alligator.
After while
Crocodile
Bye for now.

That’s the signal for our end of day germ swapping hug fest, as almost all of the kids come forward for a goodbye hug. It’s a Pre-3 tradition that goes all the way back to my first year teaching 2-year-olds. I’ve never asked for hugs at the end of the day, but I’ve always received them. It starts as a trickle of children, but by this point in the year it’s most of them coming toward me across our blue rug, arms in front of them, looking a little like a scene from a Bizarro World movie about hug seeking zombie children.

Some charge forward the moment I say, “Bye bye everybody. I had fun with you today!” throwing themselves into my arms. Others who arrive on the scene later, wade right into the crowd of children around my knees, including several of their friends in their hug. Some hang back, looking for an opening. And a few wait until the initial knot of huggers breaks up altogether in order to get their own moment. Yesterday Owen came back again and again. Violet often tries to climb onto my lap. Remick is working hard to add a kiss on the lips to the routine, and I can tell he’s dissatisfied with the peck on the cheek I’ve been giving him instead. A few of the kids aren’t quite ready for the full hug, electing instead for a high-five. More kids want both the hug and the high-five.

When I reflect on it, I really am living in a Bizarro World of my own. In the past 8 years I’ve gone from being a guy who rarely hugged anyone other than his female relatives to being a man called Captain Superhugger. Hardly a day passes without someone forwarding me some kind of hug related news or a “free hugs” video.



Right now I’m in the middle of a group of people trying to build a “hugging wall.”

Everywhere I turn hugs have become a central part of my life. But of course, it started right here at Woodland Park where the hugs flow like water.

Teaching The Kids I Already Know

The parents at the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschools are also students. I’m not just talking symbolically. They are all tuition paying, credit earning students enrolled at North Seattle Community College. They even all receive student cards so they can qualify for discounts.

I’m sure most of the parents don’t think about their status as students very often. I know I didn’t when I was a co-op parent, but once a week our parent educator is in the room for the express purpose of teaching the parents. Beyond that, once a month as part of our parent meeting, Woodland Park families take part in a parent education session lead by the educator.

If there is one thing former students tell me they miss about preschool, it’s either the sensory table or the unicycle merry-go-round. If there is one thing former parents say they miss, it’s the parent education.

Last night our 3-5 class educator Elizabeth Bird led us in a session that took us around the room giving each parent the opportunity to profile her child. I’ve worked with a number of educators, each with her own style, but one common element is to start the year with some version of this exercise, and I always love it.

Since parents work as my assistant teachers, this is valuable information that will help them be more effective. We learn about each child’s temperment, likes and dislikes, best methods for soothing, and challenges.

This is an important check-point for me as well. Since this is our 3-5’s class, I’ve known most of the children for a minimum of a year and often longer. I like to think I have a pretty good handle on the kids by the time they reach this class, but there is nothing like hearing about a child from a parent’s perspective to make sure I’m seeing the same child they are.

Last night, I was thrilled to hear parent-after-parent describe the kids I already know. In fact, as each of the parents finished I had to bite my tongue to avoid adding to what they said or offering a cute, illustrative story from the classroom. This is a powerful position from which to be teaching.

Conditional Parenting

If the day ever came when we were able to accept ourselves and our children exactly as we and they are, then, I believe, we would have come very close to an ultimate understanding of what “good” parenting means. It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance – and often far short. But one of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is the gift of accepting that child’s uniqueness. –Mister Rogers

About a month ago, former Woodland Park parent Sarah sent me a link to an article from the New York Times that examines the practice of “conditional parenting,” which is a parenting approach that advocates withholding acceptance, approval, praise, and even love as a way to get one’s child to do what one wants. I know, it sounds awful, but it’s exactly the technique being advocated by such popular leading lights as Dr. Phil McGraw (who is not actually a doctor) and The Supernanny (Jo Frost).

I don’t need research to know that this is a horrible idea (although the article does site several studies that show long term harmful results). Using our love and acceptance as a kind of currency to buy certain behaviors, cheapens what it means to love our children. In fact, I wonder if it can really even be called love when it’s used as a tool of control and manipulation. This isn’t to suggest that the alternative is blindly heaping praise on children. That’s just another form of conditional parenting (e.g., I’m giving you this love an attention because you did X or Y).

In practice . . . unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.

That’s certainly how I like to be supported. Maybe the bottom line is to treat children like people.

Hobby-Horses On The King's Highway

Vivian Gussin Paley’s book The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter is the true story of a preschooler who insists he is a helicopter. In spite of his absolute conviction, it is evident to the adults in his life that he is indeed not a helicopter. His classmates, however, take him at his word and befriend him as a helicopter.

I was reminded of this story recently when Susan wrote this:

There was a girl in Reid’s preschool who was very boyish. Always had a baseball cap on, always in jeans. Named Andrea, she insisted on being called Andy . . . (Reid) said she was mad because everyone found out she was a girl. This was startling to me on two levels. First, I’d never seen a kid who so clearly wanted to be the other sex. But even more shocking was the fact that kids in Reid’s class didn't have her clearly in their minds as a girl. How could they not? As an adult you look at a little girl, see she has a girl name, and she goes over there on the girl list. That kids would . . . not even try to have her in a category – that had never occurred to me.

I have a similar story. Our friend’s daughter insisted from a very young age on being called Joseph and wearing boy’s clothes. As with the helicopter and Andy, it was evident to the adults in her world that she was indeed not what she claimed to be, but her classmates took her at her word.

This is the place where I could link you to research about young children and gender identity, but I’m confident that my general observations here will more or less jibe with the science. These are the tendencies I’ve observed, by age group:

Two-year-olds tend to be, at best, vague on gender identity. Most parents can dress their little boys in a sister’s hand-me-downs, for instance, without a fight. If I play “princess,” the kids don’t seem to suffer from much cognitive dissonance. Boys might be more often drawn to play with “cars,” and girls to “dolls,” but I’ve seen nothing that leads me to conclude that they’re making conscious decisions based on how they perceive gender. These might well be choices driven by the biology of gender, but not gender “identity.”

Three-year-olds are starting to develop their own theories about gender. You’ll probably have a hard time getting most 3-year-old boys into “girl’s” clothing, for instance, and when I play princess they demonstrate that they get the “joke” by laughing, or the dissonance by insisting that I “take it off.” Three-year-olds will likely be able to tell you that cars are for boys and dolls are for girls, but they don’t tend to consciously divide themselves by gender – it’s more an accident of the toys/games they choose. In spite of this, their understanding of gender identity is still pretty superficial and malleable. Ana, for instance, insisted that in spite of my beard, I was girl because I wore an earring. If I took the earring out, I was a boy. Many threes have insisted to me that they could change gender by virtue of the clothing they wore.

Four-year-olds are becoming hyperaware of gender. They have absorbed much of our cultural stereotyping, are convinced that their gender is a fixed characteristic, and tend to actively seek out same gender playmates. If someone is going to play the “no boys/girls allowed” card it’s going to be a 4-year-old. When I play princess with these kids, they’ll usually engage in long discussions about why I, as a boy, can never be a princess, but that I can instead choose to be a prince. They often have very strongly held convictions about what it means to be a boy or a girl, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. My own daughter, for instance, insisted that girls do the cooking, even though her father does 90 percent of the cooking in her own household.

I’m uncomfortable writing about gender, which you can probably tell by the way I’ve twisted myself into a pretzel inserting weasel words like, “tend,” “likely,” “often,” and “most.” That’s because when it comes to gender there are no absolutes.

Many years ago, my wife and I belonged to a couple’s book club. One of the books we read was Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, which catalogs the different ways men and women communicate and why we so often misunderstand one another. Everyone in the book club agreed that Tannen had hit the nail on the head, yet every one of us also agreed that the dynamics she outlined didn’t apply to our own relationships.

That’s because the “theoretical” person bears no more than a passing resemblance to an actual person. As useful as labels are when it comes to thinking of people categorically (as in the development of advertising campaigns or flu vaccines) they are at best useless when we apply them to individuals, and often quite harmful. For instance, I know that men tend to have greater upper back strength, but I also know that there are thousands of individual women who would put me to shame in the weight room. If I use gender as a basis upon which to judge physical strength, such as in determining who gets the job as the firefighter, I harm all of those women who could kick my ass.

When it comes to our friends and family, when it comes to the individual students in my class, there is nothing important to learn from Teacher Tom’s observations or Deborah Tannen’s parsing of gender and communication. Labels have their uses, but not when it comes to real relationships between real people. The only labels that matter to individuals are the labels they apply to themselves, be they 2 or 92. It’s not our place to insist that they've mislabeled themselves, but rather to try to understand and accept them at their word.

The great 18th century author Laurence Sterne conceived of the world as a place in which each of us rode through life on our own special “Hobby-Horse.” It’s because we sit astride our horses, that we each have a unique perspective on the world, none more or less legitimate than another. He saw the world’s problems as stemming not from our differences, but rather from our habit of insisting upon others adopting our views.

“ . . . so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, -- pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?”

Are the labels I hang on myself delusional? Probably, but no more so than everyone else’s. Only we know what labels are best suited to ourselves. At any age, we do one another no greater honor than to simply tip our hats to the other Hobby-Horse riders with whom we share the king’s highway, be they helicopters or boys named “Andy.”

Even In The Land Of Giants

There are 22 children enrolled in the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool Pre-3 class. It might sound like a big group of 2-year-olds until you consider that as a cooperative we also have a minimum of 10 parent assistant teachers in the room at any given time. On top of that, this early in the year, we’re also hosting anywhere from 3-5 extra adults each day in the form of parents who aren’t yet ready to try the separation experiment.

At our fall parent orientation meeting I always say, “I expect parents to drop off their children when it is not their work day.” This exact phraseology was suggested to me by parent educator Jean Ward, who knows my own history as a Pre-3 parent, which didn’t actually include leaving our 2-year-old daughter alone until the final day of preschool. It’s an expectation, not a requirement. After all, this is a co-op. Parents choose co-ops because they have the desire and ability to stay with their kids at school. I understand that. I will never kick a parent out the door (although I will put them to work). In fact, I won’t even broach the subject unless I’m asked about it.

That said, learning to trust the world without mommy or daddy immediately at hand is one of the primary goals of the Pre-3 year.

Many of our 2-year-olds have already been thriving in the classroom without a parent for weeks now. In fact, by my count 13 of the children have made their separations without a tear – most have even seemed rather blasé about the whole thing. This doesn’t mean we’re through the woods. It’s not uncommon for a child to cruise along for a few weeks or even months, then to suddenly have a “relapse” of the dreaded separation anxiety, but so far so good.

Six of the kids have taken the separation experience a bit harder. So far, the parents of these children have elected the approach that I’ve found to be the “cleanest,” if sometimes emotionally wrenching: hand their child off to Teacher Tom or another parent, cheerfully kiss them goodbye, and go. There have been tears, of course, some of it a bit intense, but we’ve managed to work through it in 5-10 minutes in most cases, stand the kids on their own two feet (literally), and get to the business of school. A couple of the children have objected to my efforts to sooth them, but have found safe havens with other adults. This is one of great things about co-op – there are plenty of loving arms to crawl into. Again, this doesn’t mean we’re done with teary goodbyes, but it’s exciting that most of them have now successfully operated in the world without mom or dad at their side. That’s a pretty powerful thing to learn about yourself and the world.

This leaves us with only 3 families yet to take the plunge, which is nothing short of amazing. Often, by this time of the year there are still a half dozen families, or more, who are putting off the big day. I expect that day will come soon for these families, but if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. There’s enough pressures in being a parent, I would hate for this to be one of them. Believe me, they grow up and go out into the world on their own soon enough.

Yesterday was a teacher in-service day for the public schools, so we opened our doors to older siblings who had the day off, most of whom were Woodland Park alumni. As these impossibly tall versions of these former preschoolers came through the door, I was struck by their comparative sophistication and poise. There was an impressive worldliness about them that contrasted sharply with the toddling innocence of our 2-year-olds. Some of them had been bubbly, outgoing preschoolers, while others had been slower to warm. Some had always strode the world as if it belonged to them, while others had hung back to observe before making commitments.

Yesterday, however, they were all giants in every sense of the word. They crossed our tiny classroom in long-legged strides and rode our “unicycle merry-go-round” at speeds heretofore unattained. They engaged one another with conversation, courtesy, and discretion without any adult intervention whatsoever. They were independent human beings, models of where our 2-year-olds are headed.

Miriam brought her big brother Colin to class. She and her mother Latife were sitting inside one of our Playhut cubes surrounded by pumpkins. From the outside they were invisible to the rest of us. At one point Colin, an impressive “giant,” looked up from what he was doing and didn’t see his mommy. He systematically scanned the room. No mommy. In his eyes a mild panic showed as he began to slowly make his way around the class. He knew from experience to engage another adult and chose our parent educator Dawn Carlsen to help him in his hunt. They asked me if I knew where Latife was and I pointed her out. Relieved, Colin briefly checked in with her, then went back about his independent business.

At the end of the day as we sang our Halloween songs at Circle Time, I noticed Sylvia’s “giant” brother Zachary curled up on his own mommy's lap, while Sylvia sat halfway across the room. And “giant” Hattie had a couple of emotional moments that required mommy to dry her tears, while her little brother Elliott went cheerfully about his business.

Separation is a lifelong experiment, but so is connection. That’s the way it is, even in the land of giants.

Win-Win

Victory can only be claimed with both sides can say the same. --Ghandi

Regard your opponent as a potential ally. --Ghandi

Jack was sitting in a Playhut cube on top of a pile of giant plastic insects. In fact, it was a pile of all the giant plastic insects. He’d collected them while the other children were busy elsewhere and now he was “using” them.

Earlier in the day Charlie B. had developed an attachment to the giant grasshopper. When he spotted his prized insect in Jack’s pile he did what most young 3-year-olds would do: reached in and grabbed it.

This apparently wasn’t the first attempt by a child to separate Jack from his collection, and having learned to be vigilant, he laid a firm hand on the grasshopper as well, letting out a fierce wail.

Not to be deterred, Charlie held on, saying softly, “I want it.”

It’s a scene played out daily in preschools across the country. Sometimes it’s a child who uses all the blocks and simply can’t spare any for other builders. Sometimes it’s a play dough horder or a plastic fork aggregator or a baby doll adopter. The common characteristic is that while they may have acquired these monopolies fairly, they aren’t playing with the toys as much as simply defending them. It may have been fun cornering the market, but the joy is lost in the serious game of protecting the pile.

We’ve all found ourselves, often inexplicably, backed into a corner, defending an untenable position. As adults it usually involves knowing that we’ve lost the argument, but being unable in our emotional state to admit it, we get louder, less reasonable, and bent on changing the subject to something we can be right about. We find ourselves chosing to be miserable rather than admit to being wrong. The only way out of it is time for reflection (followed by an act of contrition) or better yet, an “opponent” who offers us a safe landing place.

I put my hand on the grasshopper and stated, “Jack had this grasshopper first.” Charlie released his grip, but not without saying again, “I want it.”

Jack tucked the grasshopper firmly under his knee. He was clearly miserable, which is the natural state of anyone protecting a hoard. Charlie was upset at not attaining his prized grasshopper, which is the natural state of the disappointed.

I described the situation as clearly as I could: “Jack has all the bugs. Charlie wants to play with the grasshopper.” I had no idea of what was going to happen next. After making the statement, I just let it hang there.

We all sat in the silence. Jack’s insects were no longer under attack, which must have given him enough emotional breathing space to move out of the corner into which he’d retreated. After a moment, Jack pulled the grasshopper from under his knee and handed it to Charlie. Charlie beamed. Jack beamed back at him. Charlie then climbed into the Playhut cube with Jack and they sat there together for several minutes, still beaming, handing out giant plastic insects to whoever asked.

Ghandi is often said to have devised the “win-win” model of conflict resolution. There is no better win than one that makes your opponent your ally. Win-win feels good and when we feel good, we do good.

(This may be totally unrelated, but I suspect not.) Later in the day, Peter removed himself from the classroom and sat on the steps just outside the door. He looked sad. I went to sit beside him and Charlie followed me. I said, “Peter, you look sad.”

He answered something about a friend, but I didn’t quite make it out. Before I could ask him to repeat it, Charlie took Peter by the hand, walked him through the classroom, and up the stairs into our loft. Charlie put his hands on the side and started jumping up and down. Peter, now smiling, started jumping beside him.

I love my job.

Halloween Part 5: “It’s Not Natasha!”

(Note: This probably won’t be the last post on the subject of Halloween, but it will likely be the last one in this particular 5 act Shakespearean play. Act I, Act II, Act III, and Act IV do not build any kind of dramatic arc, but you might be interested.)

When my daughter Josephine was 3, her friend Natasha came to our house for a visit. The girls have always gotten along famously and have known one another their whole lives.

Earlier in the day, Natasha had enjoyed a fall festival where her face had received a magnificent kitty cat paint job. It was truly a work of art and she had clearly sat for a long time to get it done. Of course, when she arrived at our front door, Josephine took one look at her, shrieked, and ran from the room. No amount of explaining or cajoling could reconcile her to the fact that this kitty was her friend. The only words she could say were, “It’s not Natasha! It’s not Natasha!” It was heartbreaking for both kids, and the face-paint finally, sadly, had to be washed off.

This was my first, but by no means my last experience with a preschooler freaking out over a costume that hid its wearer’s face. My first Halloween as a teacher, instead of a single costume I brought a box full of costume items, a couple of which were masks. Over the course of the evening I would pop in a pair of fangs, or don my skeleton-hand gloves, shake a silly wig, or slip on my fake tongue with an eyeball on the end. The responses ranged from laughter to “so what?” But when I came out of my workroom wearing a simple Zorro-style mask, the look of abject horror in the children’s eyes made me swear off masks forever.

I’m not the only preschool teacher who has learned to take extra precautions around masks. Fellow teacher Jenni posted this comment to yesterday’s post:

In some of our classrooms, we add some masks to the environment (non threatening of course) and at circle and other times we "practice" putting them off and on and looking at ourselves in the mirror.
 No matter how non-threatening a mask is, it's still scary, especially for those little ones 2-3 years old, because there is that fine line of fantasy and reality...Do you really change into SpongeBob, or is it just pretend? By practicing, they can really explore this part of things.
 In circle the children and teachers all practice together and talk about what is REALLY happening.

We do a similar exercise at Circle Time. I’ve made a couple dozen jack-o-lantern masks by cutting out the eyes, noses, and mouths from some jack images imprinted on Halloween party plates. We have a couple short songs/chants where we practic hiding our faces, then revealing them with a “peek-a-boo” or a “boo!”

Someone is hiding
Hiding
Hiding.
Someone is hiding.
Who could it be?
Peek-a-boo!
I see you!

And

Halloween is coming,
And this is what I’ll do,
I’ll hide behind this pumpkin face,
And then I’ll say,
“Boo!”

We also have a set of “eyes” and “mouths” that children can hold up in front of their own faces to change their expressions. I sometimes use them too, but have learned to make sure the children see me before I cover my real face, then immediately afterwards, so they always know it's me.

Although we don’t allow masks or face paint at our evening Halloween parties (there’s just too much other stuff going on to have to deal with masks), as Jenni points out, it’s important to help children overcome this particular fear. Not only do we want them to begin to understand the line between pretend and real, but it also could save their lives.

Each year, for instance, hundreds of children run and hide from firefighters who have come into their homes to rescue them. Modern firefighting equipment includes oxygen tanks and protective masks that completely cover a face. Often there is no indication of eyes, noses or mouths. Recognizing this, our local fire department visits preschools, with the primary purpose of donning their entire turnout suits, including the mask and oxygen tank. Even with our constant assurances that friendly Firefighter Mike is still “inside there,” many of the children remain unconvinced until he removes the mask. For weeks after the firefighters visit, I hold up a picture of a fully equipped firefighter and ask, “What do you do if you see someone dressed like this in your house?” And while most of them know the answer is, “Go to him!” there remain a few who say, “Run away!”

It’s hard to overcome our innate fear of the faceless (or clearly artificial face). Our faces, after all, are the essential part of how we visually present ourselves to the outside world. We’re programmed from infancy to study and comprehend facial features. When those are hidden or altered, our brains tell us that something fundamental is wrong. As adults, it can be a thrilling experience to alter something so basic, but for young children it can be a true nightmare.

Halloween Part 4: “Halloween Is Not Scary.”

(Note: This is the fourth chapter in our serialized non-fiction “book” about Halloween. Chapter 1, chapter 2, and chapter 3 are not necessary to understanding the “plot,” but you might want to check them out.)

As we went around the room on Monday, sharing our knowledge about Halloween, Finn P. raised his hand. He let us know that, “Halloween is not scary.” I was expecting this assertion to be quickly shot down, but instead there was a sort of nervous lull in our usual low-level Circle Time hubbub.

I echoed, “Halloween is not scary,” thinking, perhaps, that the others hadn’t heard him.

Crickets.

Of course, we all know that Halloween is scary. As we went on to discuss other aspects of the holiday I waited for the opportunity to bring up the subject again, but the children skirted it for the rest of the session.

In yesterday’s Pre-K class as I sat down to lunch with the older children, I was determined to bring it up. Talking about scary things is the best way to rob them of their ability to frighten us and I didn’t want to let our session go without at least starting the conversation. Of course, I wasn’t expecting the full discussion of scary stuff to take place as we sat around the table, but I was hoping to at least break through the reticence from yesterday. On Monday, Annabelle had told us that she was going to dress as a vampire, a notoriously scary character, so I started with her.

“Annabelle, I forgot what you’re Halloween costume is going to be.”

“A vampire!” She evidently loved saying the word.

I asked, “A scary vampire?”

“Yes! I’m going to be a scary vampire!” She said it as if the words were delicious.

I then started around the table. Finn was next. “I can’t remember your costume Finn.”

“A firefighter.”

“A scary firefighter?”

He paused for a moment over his sandwich. For a second, I thought he was going to say “no,” but then it seemed like the silliness of the idea struck him. He smiled, “A scary firefighter!”

We then proceeded around the table, with each child adding the adjective “scary” to his or her costume description. Ella was the only one who modified it to, “a little bit scary.” By the time we were done we were all laughing at the idea of scary queens, scary forklifts, and “a little bit scary” fairies.

This morning as the children arrive, I’m going to be at the door announcing, “I’m going to scare you . . . Boo!” My “boo” will be without force, however, and said with a smile. I’ll declare, “I scared you,” and they’ll answer, “No you didn’t!” I then fully expect to spend the rest of the day (and much of the next several weeks) playacting fright as the kids say, “Boo!” to me.

Many of our 3-year-olds, and even some of the older kids, are still figuring out the line between fantasy and reality. I’ve written before about Page, who while watching a group of his classmates engaged in dramatic play, asked me, “Is this pretend?” He was relieved to learn it was. Halloween is a great time to talk about what’s pretend and what isn’t.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be talking about potentially scary things like witches, ghosts, and monsters. Are they real? No! They’re pretend and as such they are things over which we have complete control. Those are our friends – or even us – inside of those costumes. Is that a real princess/astronaut/pirate? No! It's pretend! Halloween is a wild time of blurring the lines: we do it because it's fun. Some things might make us a little nervous, of course, but each time we take a closer look we see it’s just some regular thing from the regular world. And the feeling that this realization releases – that mixture of relief and giddiness – is a wonderful feeling, especially if experienced in the company of our friends and loved ones.

What about bats, spiders and skeletons? They are real, but not necessarily as frightening as they’re often made out to be. Our sensory table will become infested with plastic spiders, the dark area under our loft will become home to a basket full of rubber bats. And skeletons? We all have one of those inside of our own bodies. You can even feel it through your skin with the tips of your fingers.

We will further learn to master our fears by singing scary songs and reading scary stories together.

The only way to let the air out of our fears is to confront them, to talk about them, and ultimately to learn to laugh at them. Halloween is a perfect opportunity to practice this. Overcoming fear is something none of us can do on our own. It’s no accident that the most fearful people are those who spend much of their time alone or who feel alienated from society. It’s only when we’re together that we’re bigger than our fears.

Boo!

Halloween Part 3: "Trick-Or-Treat"

(Note: Welcome to the third part in our Halloween mini-series. If you need to catch up here is episode 1 and episode 2.)

Yesterday, I asked the 3-5 children to raise their hands and “Tell us something you know about Halloween.” By far, the number one answer was, “Trick-or-treating,” with it’s companion “Candy,” coming in a close second.

My wife Jennifer grew up primarily in Austria and Germany, and while European nations are today increasingly catching the Halloween fever, it was a non-existent holiday in her own youth. Sure they had opportunities to wear costumes, but there was nothing to compare to our tradition of going from door-to-door begging for candy. Although I would regal her with tales of my youthful forays of filling pillow cases, then coming home to dump the candy into a big pile on the living room floor to 1) remove all “yucky” (i.e., non-candy) items, 2) check for hidden poison or razor blades, and 3) enter into negations with my brother over trades, she didn’t see the point.

When our daughter was two, we joined some friends for a “safe” trick-or-treat adventure at the Wallingford Town Center, a mall of entrepreneurial shops carved out of an old school building. Jennifer’s response to her first trick-or-treating experience was still, “So?” But then we decided to do the real thing by hitting up some homes in the neighborhood. Since it was a group of 4 adults and 2 small children, 3 of us waited on the sidewalk as the girls were escorted to each door. Standing in the fall night with Jennifer as our little princess in a parka made her way past grimacing jacks and thick tangles of artificial spider web, swarms of giddy ghouls pushing past us in the dark, adult voices hallowing to one another down the block, she started to become visibly excited. Soon she insisted on being the one to walk the girls to the doors, and before long her's was the loudest voice calling, “Trick or treat!”

Living in a big city, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that our neighborhoods are real neighborhoods, but on Halloween, as families pour out into the streets, in the dark of night, we claim them for our own. We go to our neighbor’s doors, whether we know them or not, ring the bell and they’re happy to see us, complimenting us on our attire. What an incredible experience for children: most of the strangers, most of the time are friendly people! For me, that’s the real magic of Halloween. As an adult the candy is secondary to the exercise of greeting and being greeted on the doorsteps of my neighbors.

The candy, however, is central to the kids. Every parent handles it differently. I’ve heard good arguments for almost every strategy from laissez faire to rationing to throwing the whole mess out. When my own child was a preschooler, our technique was for the adults to secretly deplete the supply, especially of chocolate, as Josephine slept – all for her own good, of course.

One of our friends went so far as to add an entirely new mythological figure to the pantheon of holiday characters called the “Sugar Fairy.” As legend has it, this deity, sister of the “Tooth Fairy,” loves nothing more than to eat sugar. Naturally, she has a mouthful of rotting teeth and a sadly out of shape body. Each Halloween Eve, she searches homes across the land for gifts of candy left for her by children. When she finds such an offering, she adds it to her hoard and in its place leaves a toy for the generous child. It's always struck me a decent solution.

In the classroom, I used to ask our Pre-K kids to bring their “leftover” candy to class, but I’ve curtailed this exercise due to the prevalence of peanut/tree nut allergies and the tendency for packaged candy to be tainted with these toxins. Instead, I have my own supply of disgusting, guaranteed nut-free candy that has been on our storage room shelves for years. It’s disgusting because of its vintage, the fact that its been on the floor many times, and by virtue of having been handled by dozens of children.

I start by reading Nancy Carlson’s charming book, Harriet’s Halloween Candy. As part of the story Harriet sorts her candy in various ways – by size, type, and favorites. The children then use masking tape to mark off an area on the rug for their own use, and are each given a collection of “disgusting, not-eating candy” to organize as they see fit. It’s a terrific pre-math exercise and fun to see all the different ways they manage it.

As we shared our knowledge about Halloween yesterday, Thomas gleefully cautioned us that we get “so much candy that we can’t eat it all in one day or we’ll get a tummy ache.” I’m not sure if he was speaking from experience or merely passing on some wisdom he’d been taught. Indeed, in our story, Harriet, in an effort to protect her stash from her younger brother, devours her entire supply in a single sitting, bringing on the dreaded tummy ache.

Candy is a treat with a built in trick. It's a hard lesson to learn, but somebody has to do it.

Halloween Part 2: “It’s A Big Circle.”

(Note: This post is the second in my multi-part Halloween extravaganza. Here’s the first one in case you missed it.)

My daughter Josephine’s birthday falls on the day before Halloween, so it’s always been a significant celebration for our family. For her second birthday I lined our mantelpiece with a half dozen jack-o-lanterns carved from some of those small sugar pumpkins (they’re tough little buggers to carve; I don’t recommend it). For each subsequent year, we’ve added more and larger jacks until last October when I carved nearly 50. They lined the driveway, dotted the lawn, stood guard on fence posts, crowded our upstairs balcony, and even leered down at party guests from the branches of trees.

It’s only natural that this mid-autumn hobby of mine would roll into the classroom.

We generally start with 8-10 pumpkins of various sizes and they become visitors in our classroom, sometimes hanging out in the block area where they are rolled around, hauled in the beds of toy trucks, and included in constructions.

Sometimes we find them in the drama area where they become the centerpiece for imaginary meals, or family members in a game of playing house.

Sometimes they’re in the sensory table where they’re poked and prodded with various tools, or buried in beans, rice and seeds. We’ve learned that they float in water.

Sometimes they find themselves on the art table where children draw on them with markers, then erase them with damp cloths.

They even make an appearance in the “hay maze” we build out of gym mats standing on end.

But even the youngest children know their destiny is as jack-o-lanterns. And sure enough, one day, as the excitement for Halloween is reaching a fevered pitch, I position myself in the middle of the classroom with a big tub between my feet and start carving.

I’m capable of carving quickly – I can usually knock out a good one every 10 minutes when I’m in production line mode – but with these I take my time.

I start by showing them my pumpkin saw. (The pumpkin saw, incidentally, is a terrific innovation in the world of squash carving. It’s far, far superior to the traditional kitchen knife in that it gives you more control and allows for quicker, more precise outcomes. It’s fortunate that they’re cheep because I usually snap off at least 4-5 of them every season.) I explain that it’s an adult tool, that it’s designed for cutting, and that they should, therefore, keep their fingers to themselves.

The next thing we do is predict what we’re going to find inside. The older kids are generally confident we’ll find seeds, but many of the 2-year-olds genuinely don’t know. One of the most common off-target predictions is “candy,” which is logical given how closely the holiday is tied to sugary sweets.

I then angle the knife into the pumpkins and saw a circle around the stem, pointing out the shape and making further silly predictions about what we’ll find inside. We pull off the top with some fanfare, then I invite the children to help clean out the pulp and the seeds. There are rarely more than one or two takers in the bunch, contrary to what one might expect, and even these brave souls only pull out a couple of fist’s full each. (This is where I’m able to save a great deal of time in the carving process. I’ve learned through experience that if you scrape down the insides too well, you accelerate the rotting process. In other words, I leave most of the pulp and seeds inside, just removing enough to make room for a candle. Personally, I like the look of all those grisly innards dangling down behind the features of my jacks when they’re lit, and the fragrance of burning pumpkin innards is actually quite intoxicating.)

Now comes the time to start making the faces. We spend a lot of energy discussing what kind of expressions we want (happy, sad, angry, surprised, scary, etc.) and what shape the individual features will take (triangles, squares, circles, ovals, wiggly, etc.). The final touch is to carve the triangle-shaped “chimney” into the “hat,” then we sing the song:

Once I had a pumpkin
A pumpkin
A pumpkin
Once I had a pumpkin
With no face at all.

With no eyes
And no nose
And no mouth
With no teeth.

Once I had a pumpkin
With no face at all.

Now I have a jack-o-lantern
A jack-o-lantern
A jack-o-lantern
Now I have a jack-o-lantern
With a happy (sad, angry, etc.) face.

With happy eyes
And a happy nose
And a happy mouth
With happy teeth

Now I have a jack-o-lantern
With a happy (sad, angry, etc.) face.

Once the carving is done we’ll have an array of expressions to refer to at Circle Time as we sing: “If you’re happy (sad, angry, etc.) and you know it . . . your pumpkin face will show it.”

I save some of the cut-out facial pieces, clean them, then use a few of the jacks as “pumpkin puzzles” over the next couple days with the eyes, noses, mouths, and “hats” as the puzzle pieces.

The jacks live in the classroom until our traditional evening party, when they are taken outside to the playground to be lit. When it gets good and dark, I sneak out to our garden and arrange the jacks along the top of the fence where they smile, scowl, leer, and pout down upon the children as we tour the "Jack-o-lantern Garden." It looks wonderful and smells like pumpkin pie.

But Halloween is not the end of our pumpkins’ lives at Woodland Park. In many ways it’s only the beginning.

On the Tuesday Pre-K class following the parties, at least one jack takes part in our David Letterman-inspired science experiment called “Break or Bounce,” which involves me climbing to the top of a ladder and dropping various things off to see what happens. The jack, needless to say, is usually one of the highlights.

The rest of the jacks are piled into the beds of our garden, where over the course of the next several weeks, we fill them with dirt, drop them, stomp them, chop them, squish them. We notice teeth marks where the squirrels have gnawed on them. We talk about the bugs that come to infest them. We discuss their future as worm food. We examine them as they change texture, grow mold, and become piles of mush. We notice, ultimately, that only the stems remain.

Last year, during our Pre-3 party, as we admired the glowing jacks, Sammantha, Woodland Park grad and older sister of Alex, said to me: “Tomorrow you’ll put all of these jack-o-lanterns into the garden, then they’ll decompose and become dirt and a pumpkin vine will grow from one of the seeds.”

She’d been through the process 3 times during her years with us and knew the drill.

Sure enough, when I arrived to open school this fall, there was a pumpkin vine twining across the garden.

As Sammy said, “It’s a big circle.”

Halloween Part 1: “I Am A Powerpuff Girl!”

(Note: When I started writing this, I intended to put all of my Halloween material into it, but quickly realized I had way too much for a single post. This will be at least a three-parter, maybe more.)

I read somewhere that only Christmas surpasses Halloween in terms of retail sales. I'm glad it's become so popular. I love the ancient "pagan" holidays (e.g., winter and summer solstice, the equinoxes, May Day, etc.) because they’re secular, fun for both kids and adults, and based on observable scientific fact. People sometimes try to attach Halloween to Christianity, but it predates the birth of Christ by thousands of years. Several years ago I went to a fantastic Pacific Science Center Planetarium show in which they detailed the astrological phenomenon that likely prompted ancient peoples across Europe to celebrate what we now call Halloween. Like all pagan celebrations it was a pre-scientific attempt to make sense of the physical world that ancient people observed around them. It was a magnificent exercise in imagination, one so powerful we still enjoy it today.

Our school’s “high holidays" come during the January-February run of Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Chinese New Year, and Valentine’s Day. It’s a feverish rush from one celebration to the next culminating in a classroom decorated with rainbow people, dragons, and pink hearts.

In contrast, the build-up to Halloween is a long, steady march that begins now and culminates in an evening costume party to which the children bring their families.

I knew it was time to get started on Thursday when both Katherine and Thomas excitedly described their Halloween costumes to me (princess and forklift respectively). At Circle Time I got out my clipboard and asked the children to raise their hands and tell us what they were going to be, then compiled a comprehensive list.

I love this exercise. We’ll probably run down this list at every Circle Time between now and Halloween. It's a great way to get everyone participating. I’ll read their names and their proposed costumes. Some children stick doggedly to their original designs, while others treat it as a creative exercise, changing their minds right up to the big day itself.

I often see parents rolling their eyes at their child’s latest iteration, especially when it switches to “alligator” two days before Halloween after a month of wanting to be a ghost. Some parents scramble to help their child fulfill his preschool wish, but I like to remind them that our school discussion about costumes is a separate discussion from the one they have at home.

This process can lead to some imaginative solutions. For instance, during my first year teaching, a boy named Jace announced day-after-day that he was going to be a "Power Puff Girl." He always pronounced it boldly with his fist held over his head. When he arrived at our party, however, he was dressed in what was clearly a lion costume.

I said, "I thought you were going to be a Power Puff Girl." Behind him his mother Rena was frantically making gestures telling me to shut up. Evidently, there had been some creative negotiations at home.

Jace didn’t miss a beat. He threw both arms over his head and answered, "I am a Powerpuff Girl!" And, indeed, he was.

God Shouted At Me

This past week has me excited about being alive and it’s not just because it included my first payday since last May.

I have this spiritual idea that god (however you define that) is speaking to us all the time, but most of us, most of the time, don’t listen very carefully so we miss the message. That’s why people find it useful to go to church or meditate or take long solitary hikes in the woods. But sometimes god shouts at us so loudly that we can’t help but hear it. This has been one of those weeks.

Mister Rogers To The Rescue
At the top of my list of messages received is this email from a preschool teacher and reader in Colorado whose grandsons both attended Woodland Park. If I’ve ever needed evidence that I’m doing what I ought to be doing, it’s this:

Hi Tom,
Last night there was a shooting at our local Applebee’s restaurant. I thought, "I hope no one I know was there.”

Today we had Open House at (our preschool). A dad and mom commented they had been there and the dad rushed to help the lady who was shot. The mom expressed concern that her 2 children might be affected by the incident. Thinking about your story from Mister Rogers, I nodded and said, "Yes, perhaps, but allow your children to think about the people who helped and the caregivers . . ." The mom looked shocked that the children would remember the incident and then smiled a little, reflected on my comment, and said, "Thank you for helping me give the right words to my children!" I referred her to your site as well.

You just might never know whom you have helped!

Thank you!

Hugging Wall
Clearly, god wants me to continue hugging. I’ve posted before about our performance art troupe “The Superhuggers" (here and here). In fact, the photos of me on this blog are of me in costume as “Captain Superhugger.”

This week, my brother sent me this link to an installation called “Anonymous Hugging Wall” by an artist named Keetra Dean Dixon. (I can’t figure out how to contact her so I don’t feel right about posting the photos here.) I shared the link with my Superhugger friends and it’s inspired us to build our own more elaborate version for the Fremont Arts Council’s Winter Solstice Feast.

The Feast is often described as our “indoor parade.” We generally take over some sort of vacant office or warehouse space and transform it into a magical venue of music, dance and art on the longest night of the year. (Probably the most magical aspect of all is that it’s a potluck for 600-1000 people – and it actually works!)

We’re still working out the details, but the hugging wall idea seems to be evolving into a two-way hugging apparatus (either a long wall or even a circular room) that will allow feasters to take turns embracing one another from either side. We’re even going to make sure to install child-level arms so they can hug too.

In theory, you won’t know whether you’re hugging a man or woman, an old person or a young one. You won’t know if it’s someone you love or hate, if they're well-groomed or not, or if they're wearing tattoos or a suit and tie. I’m excited about the idea of “experiencing” other people simply by the quality of their hug, then seeking them out afterwards. Not only will it be a cool party game, but I can imagine learning a great deal more about the people with whom I’ve made art over the years.

Building Ramps
This week our Pre-K science and math projects involved building ramps.

For science we put out a variety of boards, blocks, gutters and Hot Wheels tracks, along with a collection of wheeled vehicles and balls, then let the kids go at it, experimenting with angles, speeds, and gravity. Our math project took a more controlled approach. Each child was given a collection of spherical objects to roll one-by-one down a ramp, then chart the distance it rolled on a graph attached to their own clipboard.

You do these things and assume/hope they’ve learned something. On Wednesday preschool mom Reshma told me, “When Anjali got home on Tuesday, she had to build ramps.”

Woo hoo! I heard that one!

Everything Is OK Guys
I’ve learned this week that my friends seem to know me very well. Seven different people have directed me to this video, and believe me, I am inspired. Don’t be surprised to find me at Westlake Center or Seattle Center with a megaphone:



This is their website if you want to see more of the fun.

My Skirt of Children
Yesterday in our Pre-3 class I became unavoidably aware that my skirt of children has started to form. This is exciting because it means that the 2-year-olds are jumping on my bandwagon, which is the first step to molding them into a real community of children.

It was hard to walk at times with so many kids around my ankles. As I moved from station-to-station I was typically taking anywhere from 3 to 8 kids with me. Nothing in this world makes me feel more alive than to be wearing my skirt of children.

Violet declared that I’m her, “best friend,” and is fond of clinging to my leg as I walk around the room.

Sylvia has stopped hiding her face in her mom’s shoulder when I talk to her, has started giving me her sweet smile, and even joined the “skirt” on a couple of excursions.

Owen and Ava we’re both upset about their parents leaving them at preschool for the first time, but both let me calm them down, then settled in for a terrific day at school. Sasha is still a bit intimidated by me in person, but let her grown-up friend Michelle help her get comfortable as well. Sasha’s mom later told me that she talks fondly of me at home and likes to look at my "Captain Superhugger" picture on this blog, so I’m counting her as a future skirt-mate.

I’m grateful that god shouted at me this week. I’m listening. I heard it. Loud and clear.

Raising Hands

“I’m looking for people sitting quietly on their bottoms with their hands up." --Teacher Tom

Unlike in the Pre-3 class where Circle Time tends to be about singing song after song, in 3-5's we spend a lot more time in "discussion.” That's why the practice of raising hands takes on such importance, and why most of our activities at the beginning of the year involve ample opportunity to learn what happens when you do raise your hand and when you don’t. It makes for some squirrelly, somewhat chaotic Circle Times, but this is the only path I know to the other side.

Of course, most of our Pre-K kids have the drill down. Their year of experience taught them that if they have a little patience, they’ll get their turn to speak. When I start a sentence, “I want someone to raise their hand . . .” the sea of hands at this time of year is mostly comprised of the 4-year-olds, although some of the younger children are already figuring it out, largely by role modeling the behavior of the older kids. Alex, for instance, has it nailed: she holds her hand up forcefully, her eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that commands, “Call me!” And Isak had a real break through yesterday after a week of often loudly expressed frustration over not getting called on when he didn’t raise his hand. Most of them, however, are still figuring it out.

Learning to take turns in a large group is not easy. For one thing, you have to actually be aware that there are other people with whom you might need to share the spotlight. This is a big deal for children who are just emerging from the era of parallel play, into the vast, exciting world of living in a community. When the hands shoot up, I see them looking around in a kind of shock, as if seeing their friends for the first time. Others don’t even seem to notice the others around them, but rather start shouting out to me. Others are horsing around with the kid beside him, apparently oblivious to what’s going on. That’s just the way it is at the start of the year in a multi-aged preschool classroom where we’re trying to merge developmental levels spread out over nearly two full years.

The simple (grammatically incorrect) statement, “I’m looking for someone sitting quietly on their bottom with their hand up,” is actually a fairly complex 3-part instruction. Not only must they raise their hand, but they must be sitting on their bottom (not standing, lying down, or on their knees), and they must be quiet. It may sound like an exercise in pedagogy run amuck, but I genuinely want to teach this without using directional statements. I don’t want to boss them into it, but rather guide them into an understanding that raising hands and taking turns is the way it works in a community.

Figuring out the raised hand is the first step. When Anjali is sitting quietly on her bottom with her hand up, I’ll call on her. As much as I try to focus on Anjali, however, I keep the other children in the corner of my eye. I need to be alert because sometimes that first raised hand is only a brief wave and I want to reward it if I can by calling that child as soon as Anjali is finished. Sometimes I’ll just think I see a raised hand in a child’s eyes and ask, “Max, did you have something to say?” I know I risk putting pressure on a child, but more often than not he’ll answer, “Yes.” But before he gets anything else out, I’ll remind him, “I’ll call on you if you raise your hand.” The second that hand goes up, he gets called. It’s an incremental first lesson.

Others have no problem with the raised hand, but struggle with the quiet part: “My hand is raised! My hand is raised!” When this happens I’ll scan the group repeating, “I’m looking for someone sitting quietly. I’m looking for someone sitting quietly.” If that doesn’t work (sometimes the child will even shout, “I’m sitting quietly!”) I’ll look right at the child and say, “I’m looking for someone sitting quietly.” If that still doesn’t work, I’ll say, “Quietly means no voices.” If there’s even a brief pause, I’ll call on that child. It’s another incremental first lesson.

The process is similar for the child who is up on her knees or standing. “I’m looking for someone sitting on her bottom.” The second that bottom touches the rug, she gets called on.

These are exhausting Circle Times for me. It often feels like we’re on the edge of chaos, and there are times when I think I’ll have to pull a Sister Mary Elephant (“Class . . . class . . . SHUT UP!). Of course I won't, but the temptation is there every day.

Love And Play

When we enrolled our daughter Josephine in cooperative preschool, I explained how it worked to a friend, telling her that there was one professional teacher in the room and a dozen parent assistant teachers. She freaked out saying, “How can you let amateur teachers teach your child? I only want professional teachers near my child.” She feared that the parents of other children would somehow damage her child’s educational prospects. So while Josephine spent her 3 years in co-op, her son attended a preschool in which parents were not allowed into the classroom, even to observe.

I could no more have made her decision than she could have, apparently, made mine. Even as a new parent who had no inkling that teaching was in my future, I knew I wanted to be there with Josephine as much as possible, and when I wasn’t I wanted her to be surrounded by the love of a community. I didn’t care about her having a teacher who could teach her how to “read” or identify Norway on map before she was 3, like some kind of circus trick, I wanted her to be in a place where she simply got to play with friends and be guided by loving neighbors.

The more I teach, the better I feel about my decision.

What parents may lack as pedagogs (and, indeed, many of them are masters) they more than make up for by bringing love into a co-op classroom. And as Mister Rogers puts it:

Learning and loving go hand in hand. My grandfather was one of those people who loved to live and loved to teach. Every time I was with him, he’d show me something about the world or something about myself that I hadn’t even thought of yet. He’d help me find something wonderful in the smallest of things, and ever so carefully, he helped me understand the enormous worth of every human being. My grandfather was not a professional teacher, but the way he treated me (the way he loved me) and the things he did with me, served me as well as any teacher I’ve ever known.

My friend also thought that our co-op sounded too much like “play school.” She wanted her child to go to “real school.” Again, as a new parent, my thoughts on the subject were not well-enough formed to answer her with logical argument (not that it would have done any good), but I just knew she was wrong. Today, with the longer perspective, I know that the time for academics will come, but to undervalue the importance of play for young children is to make a tragic mistake. Frankly, I think that goes for older children and adults as well. The times in life when my mind has been the most shut down are those times when I felt compelled to do “work” proscribed by others. When I've been playing, however, even if dressed up as hard work, I've learned the most about myself and the world.

Again, from Mister Rogers:

Play does seem to open up another part of the mind that is always there, but that, since childhood, may have become closed off and hard to reach. When we treat children’s play as seriously as it deserves, we are helping them feel the joy that’s to be found in the creative spirit. We’re helping ourselves stay in touch with that spirit, too. It’s the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives.

It’s love and play that form the foundation of a good education. Without that the rest is meaningless.