Tuesday SOL: What could be more fun?

I am participating in the
Tuesday Slice of Life.
All participants are writing about one moment, one part of their day.

A big thank you to Two Writing Teachers for providing this unique opportunity

for teacher-writers to share and reflect.

I am delighted to be on spring break and, thus, I will keep this slice short and sweet! 

Last week, our school celebrated "intersession," where our students work in mixed-age small groups on different topics over several days. My small group was comprised of nine students, a mix of preschoolers through kindergarteners, and we built forts outdoors. 

Our supplies were simple: old sheets and cloths, one water-resistant tarp for our floor, sticks, twine, clothespins, rubber bands, and a couple of really cool clamps. Each day, we built a big fort in a different location around our school and then sat inside, reading books and eating snacks. What could be more fun? Here are the highlights: 

• Hearing and seeing children's imagination run free - they created 'campfires' out of sticks and imagined a warm fire, they fought off invisible monsters, and they spontaneously shared stories about escaping, hiding, surviving...what if no one could see us? what would it be like to stay out all night? what if we lived here for real? It was so fun to hear their imaginative ideas. 

• Seeing the mixed-ages play together seamlessly, kindergarteners helping younger ones (reading books aloud! that was very exciting!), preschoolers playing along and keeping up with the older children, working hard to be 'equals.' 

• One day, we had a light rain - but we sat protected under our roof of sheets, all cozied in together, enjoying books and telling stories. 

It was a very special few days of fun times outdoors, creating together. 

Tuesday SOL What topic interests us the most?

This is a Tuesday "Slice of Life" for Two Writing Teachers. Check out their website for lots more reflections on teaching.

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It is Intersession week! This week - Tuesday through Friday - we have Intersession for an hour each morning instead of centers. Each child explores one topic for the whole week, often a topic that is not usually part of the school curriculum. All the children work in mixed age groups - preschool and Pre-K students together, in groups of only 10-12 students [compared to my usual class size of 22!]. The Teaching Residents run classes, some parents run classes. Intersession is a chance to work in new ways with different students and teachers, and typically a different classroom, too. It is interesting to see how children handle the the new routine...for one crazy hour each day, everything is a little mixed up in a totally fun way!

Last week, I shared with my preschoolers the eight topics we were offering this year: 

 Spanish Dramatic Play 

Slimy Science 

Painting Without Brushes 

Instrument Making 

 Sculptures 

Forts 

Martial Arts 

 Knitting and Beading 

I was curious to see what they were most interested in, so I created eight stations throughout the room, and at each station I acted out and described what you might do in the class. After I did my "sales pitch," I said - "If this sounds like a fun class to you, come join me at this station!" [Basically, I was having them 'vote with their bodies,' giving me an excellent visual of their favorite topics…and helping me to assign them to a particular Intersession.] 

Well, the joke was on me! Every time I concluded my pitch and declared, "If this sounds like a fun class to you, come join me at this station!", my entire class of preschoolers would come running over to this vicinity. Yes, they ran from station to station, as I shared what was great about the topic.

I turned to my Teaching Resident and said - "Well, this "voting technique" was a total fail on my part! These preschoolers love everything we do and I don't know anymore about their favorites now than I did at the outset of our day." 

The idea of choosing one topic to the exclusion of all others made absolutely no sense to them.

Clearly, they are happy will all the choices offered - and amenable to try new things. This is a great disposition to have!

Ms. Wright and I are leading the "Forts" Intersession and we had such a fun start today! We have these amazing 'blue blocks' [Imagination Playground blocks] to use.

[We've had two large sets of these for a couple of years (I blogged about playing with these in the side alley at our old school location), but this year our collection tripled in size…yes, we have six sets of these Imagination blocks. These blocks are now considered an indoor recess play item…and shared amongst all the classes from preschool through sixth grade.]

However, for Intersession week, my group of 12 fort builders has access to all six bins of the blocks! We are working in the all-purpose room, an enormous space for a group of only 12 students.

At the outset, we gathered in a circle and I asked,
"Why build a fort?"

There were two instantaneous replies:

"for being comfy"
"a fort is a cozy corner"

How lovely!

Here is their list of necessary items to create a fort:

blocks,
pillows
blankets for a roof
chairs
table
a door to go in and out


The children set right to work to create the largest fort ever…they ran and ran, grabbing blocks that they needed and laying them this way and that, surrounding a large canvas flooring.

Ms. Wright and I asked a multitude of questions, guiding and building alongside - What shape should the fort be? How high will we make the fort? What pieces work best for that? How many long pieces do we have? What should we use the cylinders for? How will we make a door? Will there be windows? What should the windows look like? Will Ms. Wright and I fit in this fort or is it only for children? (Yes! We were invited to be in the fort, too!)

I couldn't believe how quickly it grew in height…how well these children worked together, focused on the same goal.

There was much debate about the door to the fort - Should it be a drawbridge? Should it be more like a real door that opens when you pull on it? Should we build it with blocks? Should we use a cloth? All of this debate was simultaneous with trial and error - blocks put in position to be a door, then toppling over, then swung open, then dropped to the floor like a bridge, then a call for a sheet followed by the need to place it just so - How to hang a sheet? How to weigh it down so that it stays in position? It was fast and furious work.

With the walls and door completed, now we needed to think of the interior amenities. A couple rectangles were brought in as beds, some squares as seats, and several curved pieces were brought in to be "rocking horses" in the fort…but these pieces shown above had another purpose. Any guesses? Tess said "We need a bathroom!" and Cameron declared, "I can make a toilet!" and then the children worked together on creating these, with Nora declaring - "We have five toilets in our fort!"

Near the end of this interior design, Ms. Wright and I began to lay a large sheet on top of the fort for the roof. All the children raced inside the fort for this fun step in the process, squealing with delight - "It's a real fort!" 

As we worked to anchor the roof, something changed personality-wise inside that fort - was it a sudden fear? heady delight? preschooler exuberance? Instantaneously, the children crashed down the exterior walls and we were left with this:

A muddle of blocks and still happy preschoolers.

They went right back to work on a new fort.

By the end of our Intersession hour, we never did succeed in getting a roof on any structure. But we sure did a whole lot of fort building.

Yes, we are going to have a super fun couple of days.



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Update 12.30.14 - Yes, the "Forts" intersession was a blast! I can't resist adding in photos from the rest of our fort building fun…here's what we did over the next many days:

Drafting blueprints of their dream forts

Can't we make this just a little higher?

We have to have a place for our horses