What does my child do everyday?

I was chatting with an alumni family recently, who has had three children go through the three year cycle at our school. As we talked about the day-to-day at school, they mentioned “Well, you know that the classroom is a bit of a black-box, right? My child went in, did a lot of things, told me about a few of them. I just saw the slow holistic growth of my child. I’m not quite sure how you do it or what they did everyday. I just trusted the process.”

Between that conversation and the many comments from our survey of “What does my child do every day?”, it sparked this blog post for me to share with you some thoughts of why we do things the way we do at the school.

As you know, we are a low technology school. While daycares do have apps that share frequent updates for each child, we value the time we spend with your children and would like to spend that time observing and giving lessons. Because many places have small group and whole group activities, the updates also look a bit different. Below I’ve included a few examples of what the morning work cycle might look like for children of all ages and I hope it gives you an idea of tricky it is to capture the importance and significance of the work that your children do at our school.

Child 1:

Comes in washes hands and uses the bathroom.

Wanders around looking for work. (Typical and for us, crucial to get them to start planning their mornings independently.)

Does the number rods (a math work) with the teacher.

Wanders some more. Helps a friend pick up some paper from the floor. (A small part of his morning but to us shows community building, socializing and helping keep our classroom clean)

Waters the plants.

Goes back to geometric solids. (A sensorial work involving language and geometry)

Waits in the waiting chair for snack. (A great lesson in patience and listening to your body for hunger cues)

Has snack.

Spends the rest of the morning drawing on a chalkboard with a friend. (Might look like “goofing off” at times. But we know that there is conversation, taking turns, compromising all happening for that child.)

Child 2:

Comes in washes hands and chooses not to use the bathroom.

Goes directly to a work saved from yesterday. Completes writing the word families with the movable alphabet with a teacher. (cat, bat, sat, etc.)

Gathers the materials to write these words on paper. Get distracted with a friend building something.

Teacher asks: would you like to write tomorrow? Child chooses to go back to her work.

Finishes writing and realizes she is hungry.

Has snack, etc.

Child 3:

Goes straight to his continent map and works on it the whole morning. (Tracing, coloring, writing the names of the countries – just a few steps in this long project).

As you can imagine, none of these can be captured in a meaningful way and shared on a daily basis. Writing “Trinomial Cube” as the work your child completed does not share any detail about that child’s progress. Also writing “drawing with a friend” does not capture how much work that might actually be for the child.

This brings me to the most important point I’d like to share with you. The child’s journey at this stage is larger than day-to-day. They may have a week when they do lots of language lessons and really get to the cusp of reading. But another week may be spent trying to make new friends, painting and exploring a new work in the classroom. We try to honor this path and record of what each child is doing on their own, lessons they get from a teacher as well as where they are on their path. The teachers also make individual plans for each child weekly, but understand if not everything is done for that week. Almost all children progress naturally and we see how far they have come every few weeks or so. But we give them the space to go at their own pace. We hope that through the pictures, blog posts and newsletters, you get a broader view of how our classrooms functions.

Does that mean there is no way to get a view into the “black box”? Not at all! Have your pick-up person check in with the teachers to find the name of a work that the child is working on. Maybe not every day, but once in a while! Have your child tell you the word of the day, which usually jogs the memory of the child into other things that happened in the morning.

Some of my favorite end of the day questions are: What was your favorite thing that you did in class today?”, “What was the most frustrating part of the day?”, “What new thing did you learn today?”