In January 2008, Suzanne was teaching at Hopkins Elementary School in Lilburn, Georgia.  Hopkins is part of the Gwinnett County School District. The elementary school had 1800 students in grades K-5, mostly Hispanic, with 140 different languages spoken in the county-wide district., with five assistant principals and the student body averaged around 50% free/reduced lunch. Suzanne was, and still is, a kindergarten teacher. She was a student in two of my classes at GVSU. After a few years teaching at the University, I found that many students set their minds on teaching a specific grade level and so I asked, somewhat rhetorically, if they would turn down a job at a different grade level, but one in which they were certified. Few students admitted that they would stick to their desires and would, indeed take a job at another grade level.  After I got to know Suzanne and found that she had set her heart on Third Grade, where she had been a para-professional, I made the comment that she seemed to have the nurturing personality of a kindergarten teacher.  Jobs in Michigan were tight when she graduated and she decided to move to the Atlanta area after being offered five different teaching jobs in the South due to a job fair at GVSU. She took a teaching position as a kindergarten teacher. She has since changed schools, but not grade levels.

Kindergarten classes at Hopkins were all day long. During the day Suzanne planned 15 different activities for her students, not including recess. These activities lasted around 15 minutes each. The day started with breakfast in the classroom.  On Wednesdays, teachers were invited to have breakfast, if they wanted it.  The daily schedule in Suzanne’s class was well organized. As per school and district policy, the “Essential Question” for the day was written on the front whiteboard.

The students started to arrive at 8:20, with the school starting at 8:50. At the end of the day the buses came in three waves, starting around 3:15.

A windsock was prominently displayed in the classroom, with a rabbit on it for the letter “R”. Learning the alphabet is still a feature of kindergarten classes.  The students got right to work when prompted. Suzanne held up a cotton ball, a tail for the rabbit, and reinforced a prior lesson on the story of Peter Rabbit. The students recounted what happened in the story, sometimes in unison. Suzanne foreshadowed and built anticipation for an upcoming story on raccoons. She mentioned the importance of language arts in the early grades, over and above the basic Social Studies standards that each state has for kindergarten students. Suzanne explained that none of the students at the beginning of the year could read or write, but by this time in January, 18 of her 19 students accomplished the basics. The 19th student arrived in December and was making headway.

Early on in project time Suzanne reviewed ordinals. The class went through the numbers 1 through 10 in unison and then she had five students come to the front of the room and had the rest of the class tell what number each student was.  The class had no problem with this activity. Next, the class, along with the rest of the school, sang the National Anthem, joined by the Suzanne and her para-pro, followed by the Pledge to the Flag, led by a student in the room.

In an aside, contrasted with winter weather in Michigan, Suzanne explained what conditions prompted a “Winter Storm Warning” in the Atlanta area. Basically, any snowfall met the requirement. This type of warning would mean that school would be cancelled and everything would come to a halt in the metro area.

The classroom was full of objects on the walls and highly sensory. There was the alphabet, numbers, a calendar, books, a globe, amongst many other things. On top of that, the students were wearing windsocks as hats. Suzanne continually praised her students and kept the young learners on task, as well as finding other things for them to do if they finished an activity ahead of their classmates.

Suzanne mentioned that she was scheduled for three formal observations a year and she already had two of them. She also had many snapshot or drop-in observations and things were going well for her.  Later in the year she informed me that she was named “Rookie Teacher of the Year”.

At 9:15 it was Gathering Time.  The class sang along in unison with a CD about flowers, sun and rain. Then they read the “Morning Message”. After reading that message, Suzanne used tongue depressors, with each student’s name on one, and as the students’ names were called, they came up to the whiteboard and circled an r they found in the Morning Message. She had the students count the words in a sentence and then had them identify what started and ended each sentence. Next, the students sang a song entitled, “Top to bottom, left to right” and repeated it several times to help remind students how to read words on a page. Another song was sung about animals. In the process, I was “squirted” by several elephant arm trunks.

Dancing was next on the list of activities. Cats meowed, frogs hopped, birds flapped their wings, snakes slithered (upright) and monkeys did what monkeys do. There was an action which exercised the students in different ways for each animal named.

Story time was next. The story was entitled “Raccoons and Ripe Corn”. Suzanne constructed a T Chart, with an R on one column and an M on the other. The students placed the words, “red”, “raccoon”, “ring” and “rocket” in the R column and “mask”, “Mr. Quinn”, “moon”, and “mitten” in the other. Suzanne reminded her students that in a previous lesson they learned about the raccoon’s stripes and their masks and they nodded in acknowledgement. Another song was played and each time the students heard an R in the song they made rabbit ears with their fingers on their heads. Next the students had to pick out “R” items on a poster.

Suzanne handed out worksheets on clipboards and then had a student explain what items needed to go on top of the paper. They had to write their name on their papers, a task which challenges some college students. (I wish I were kidding.) After writing their names, the students held up their clipboards for a quick visual check. Suzanne had the students identify different “R” words on the sheet and then pronounce them. “Run”, “Red”, “Rim”, “Rip”, “Ripe”, “Rap”. She reminded one student how to write an “R” when his letter looked more like a “V”.  He corrected it with no problem. Another student’s “N” looked like an “H” so Suzanne had him correct that as well. Each time she pointed up an error, the students took her constructive and gentle correction well and made the necessary changes.

The class moved on to literary stations. There were five different tables with five different activities. Suzanne sat at Table 1 and helped the students there with identifying letters. Table 2 featured students cutting out seeds and pasting seeds on flowers. Table 3 cut out various shapes. Table 4 had students put various numbers on paper plates and featured a sensory exercise having students using shaving cream to paint letters on cookie sheets. Table 5 was “write the room” as the students went around the classroom with clipboards finding items that matched the letters to “rabbit”. They also went “fishing” for letters with a magnet.

As the class grew a little noisy during the table activities, Suzanne blinked the classroom lights and after the second blink the students understood and grew quiet. The students used this table time to visit the restroom if they needed. The class was well-managed throughout the day, a task a former high school teacher, with huge fears of managing kindergarten students, found amazing!

The size of the student population necessitated a 10:30 lunch time for Suzanne’s kindergarten students. I had encountered the same incongruous “lunch time” when teaching in a junior-senior high school in Upstate New York. Lunch for the 7th and 8th graders was 10:30 as well. I found myself hungry during basketball and baseball seasons when my supper might be at 6 or 7 PM due to practices and games. I know my student-athletes would wolf down snacks before practice just to make it to suppertime.  I am not sure how energy-burning kindergarteners made it to the end of the school day. Suzanne also explained to me that many of the fathers worked construction jobs and on rainy days they would come share lunch with their children. Another appeal, besides eating lunch with their children, was the fact that the cost of lunch for the adults was only $2.50. Suzanne later told me that 18 of the 19 students’ parents met her during parent/teacher conferences. It was obvious that her students’ parents were concerned and invested in their children’s education.

After lunch Suzanne had a flash card activity. She told a story, “I like it!” and explained the use of exclamation points. She displayed illustrations to the class and then had them make predictions about the stories. She asked her students questions. “What’s an author do?” Write words!” “What’s an illustrator do?” Writes the picture?”  At this point in the activity Suzanne handed individual books to the students and then had them do a “picture walk”, using the pictures in predicting the story. Suzanne asked good probing questions, challenging her students’ analyzing skills. “What makes this story not real?” The students answered, “There were no clothes.” “Animals don’t stand on two legs.” “Animals don’t wear hats.” Then Suzanne asked, “What kind of story was this?” The students answered, “Make believe!”  The class read through the story twice, in unison. Suzanne also used “reading partners”, where one student would read part of the story to the partner and then the partner would return the favor. It was a form of peer teaching and it also built listening skills.

Next the students used crayons in identifying words. They used a yellow crayon in coloring over “Rs” they found in a story, orange crayons to color over the word “it” and light green to color over “but”.  The students engaged immediately in the activity. When the class grew a little noisy, Suzanne waved a “magic wand” and the chatter “disappeared”.

A money song was next on the agenda. Students held up enlarged coins while the students sang the song, written to the tune of the old “Addams Family” television show. Next the class sang through the days of the week, followed by the “calendar” song. As with many of the class activities, the songs were performed more than once in order to seat the skills and information more firmly in the students’ memories. Weather was next on the agenda, with illustrations to show “sunny”, “cloudy”, “windy”, “snowy”. A student then read through the names of the four seasons and gave examples for each season. Suzanne then reviewed the months and added the birthdays of her students for each month listed. All the while, Suzanne’s para-professional worked individually with the students. I am quite sure that Suzanne’s past experience as a para-professional helped in making her working relationship with her para a respectful, efficient and friendly cooperative experience. They were a real team. Several teachers in the school remarked that Suzanne and her para had so much in common that people thought they were sisters.

During math time Suzanne had her students count by ones, fives and tens. Then she had them figure out how to “make money” or combine the correct coins for different sums, like “How can you make 16 cents?” The students answered, “3 nickels and a penny.” Another student answered correctly, “One dime, one nickel and one penny.” A CD was played next to the tune of “Macarena” and the students used the moves from the dance song to count in different ways counting by 2s, 5s and 10s.  “Domino Math” was next. Suzanne started with a drawing of a domino and showed “3 2=5”.  Her para followed with two more examples. After that practice the students were called on to do math with the dominos. At one point a student reversed the order of the dominos, and, of course, came up with the same answer. Suzanne used that apparent operational error as a positive teaching moment, explaining to her charges that order did not matter when adding domino spots, or numbers, for that matter.

Students had homework folders that they turned in every morning as a part of the morning procedures. Suzanne singled out one student and rewarded her in front of the class for having completed 16 problem sets for homework.

Suzanne’s classroom budget for the entire year was $150. Studies have shown that many teachers spend a minimum of $500 out of their own pockets every year^[1]. Suzanne told me that the Atlanta Food Bank offered teachers the opportunity to fill an over-sized grocery cart with paper and other school supplies at a greatly reduced price. Many teachers in urban-area schools are lucky to have any classroom budgets.

Recess was outdoors at 12:40. The temperature outside was 30 degrees with the windchill in the 20s. The chill did not seem to bother the students as much as it did the teachers. The kindergarteners raced around, keeping their body temperatures up, while the teachers stood around and supervised. I wished I had a heavier jacket.

The exercise did not stop after recess.  “Lettercize” was next, moved by the tune of the movie, “Rocky”.  The students ran in place in the room for the letters A through G and then did make-believe jump roping and jumping jacks to the rest of the alphabet. Suzanne praised her students with a “Good Job!”.

Next on the agenda was an activity where the students recognized types of sentences. Combining math and English/Language Arts, Suzanne had her students count the number of words in the sentence as they identified the types of sentences they were reading.  The students correctly described the setting, as they analyzed the parts of the sentence, as well as the sentence characteristics.  The story was “Raccoons and Ripe Corn”.  “Where does the story take place?” “In a cornfield, and in a woods.”  Suzanne combined this activity with journal writing, as she had her students draw a picture to represent what was going on with the story and also practice their handwriting.  Much of Sue’s lessons during the day took an integrated approach, combining different subjects and student learning styles.

Pre-pandemic, but related to the winter cold and flu season, all the school’s classrooms were equipped with hand sanitizer.  Suzanne told me that there were two full-time nurses in the building for the 1800 students.

The next activity on the agenda was “Centers”.  During this time students could choose what and how they wanted to learn. Before they moved to various locations and activities in the classroom, they had to pack their backpacks and arrange their tables before they ventured to another table and activity.

The day finished with a “clean up” song with the title “Junior Birdman”. The kindergarteners counted down from 5 to 1 and then spelled J U N I O R  B I R D M A N.  When the class day was over the students left the room in three waves, coordinated with the school buses arriving from separate locations in the school district. Part of the bus schedule had to do with the limited space in the parking lot and the fact that all the busses could not be accommodated at the same time.  The PA system called out the bus numbers in the order that the buses were lined up outside.

Interview, 2008

Suzanne worked as a para-professional for 9 years before gaining her teaching certificate. She told me she was teamed with an excellent classroom teacher and I am sure that many of Suzanne’s teaching characteristics benefitted from her previous time in the classroom. Suzanne also credited her student teaching classroom teacher, Pat Farmer, as being a great positive influence on her teaching career. Suzanne did say that the fact that Grand Valley State, in their two-placement approach, helped her with her very diverse classroom in Gwinnett County, even though the diversity was somewhat different. She cited her ability in successfully reaching out and communicating with parents as a direct result from her diverse placement semester. Fifteen families of her 19 students spoke Spanish at home and the other four spoke English. Most of her communication with parents was delivered in two languages. Besides the large Hispanic population there were people with Bosnian, Russian, Iranian, Pakistani and Indian backgrounds. She described her new teacher orientation time as “an amazing experience” as she learned about the global nature of the school community.

Content, 2008

The day I visited Suzanne’s classroom the students were working on geography and she said her geography course during her college preparation did help with that, although her college class was geared towards the college level and not all that applicable to a kindergarten class.  One of the great lessons she practiced during student teaching was a geography lesson where she dressed up as a pirate and she replicated that lesson in her current classroom. She made a map and hid “treasure” on the playground.  The students were given moustaches and eye patches and everyone had “treasure map” to read and use in the hunt. Beyond Geography, Suzanne said she would use more Social Studies content during Black History Month, but beyond those instances she gets the most use of her Social Studies content when she watches “Jeopardy” on TV.  Not exactly an endorsement for Social Studies in the early grades.  On the other hand, Suzanne said she loved Social Studies content so I imagined she did fit in what content she could, based on her students’ ability to learn and the state guidelines. She admitted that the main focus was on English/Language Arts, and, especially, with so many children speaking English as a second language, her focus was correct and still holds true in more traditional early grade classrooms.  My main argument was the use of early children literature. I still think that stories should be used which contain Social Studies content, naturally aligned with states’ teaching standards for individual grade levels, instead of just using any kind of story.

I asked Suzanne how she felt speaking Spanish with her students and she said it was “coming back”, implying she had some background in the language.  She also said that two of her kindergarteners were bi-lingual and that was a great help to her.

Strategies and Methods, 2008

Suzanne’s first comment in this area was Bloom’s taxonomy. She also mentioned Gardner’s theory of teaching to multiple intelligences. She said her students’ learning levels were so diversified that she was continually adjusting her lessons and activities to fit her students’ needs.  I asked her about her charges’ ability to sit still and she said that they were more patient than they were at the beginning of the year, but kindergarteners were active learners, whether you wanted to teach that way or not.

Next I asked where GVSU did not do a good job with preparing her for her career and she said, “Paperwork!” She also said that when she was at GVSU there was no methods class for teaching science so she was learning how to do that “on the run”.  At the same time, teaching science was so much fun at the kindergarten level since those children were “sponges” and want to soak up everything. I asked her if she had tried new teaching methods in this, her first year, of teaching.  She said that she had tried new methods and if they worked, that was fine. If not, she tried something else. She did say that she was an avid Internet user, constantly searching for new teaching ideas and resources. I asked her how well equipped she was in terms of teaching resources and her colleagues thought there was no way she was in her first year because of the amount of things she had. She found resources that other teachers threw away when she saw a use for those discarded materials. She went to Goodwill and bought many puzzles.  Her personal classroom budget was $150 per year and she used that money at the Atlanta Food Bank. Since her school was a Title I school she could visit the Food Bank twice a year and purchase “tons of paper and pencils”. She bought materials by weight and her over-sized grocery cart weighed in at 150 pounds when she went to check out. At this point Suzanne’s para chimed in and said that the school’s Free and Reduced Lunch percentage was much higher than the 50% that Suzanne quoted earlier in the day, more like 80% or higher. Suzanne said she had a long-term substitute job at one time in Muskegon and that school’s percentage was 98.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2008

At that point in 2008 Suzanne said that if Michigan teachers wanted to teach kindergarten they would have to move South. In 2020 that is no longer true, in part due to the lower number of students majoring in Education and the impact of the Pandemic. There is a teacher shortage that will not soon go away^[2]. She also said that Early Elementary teachers needed to know how to teach English/Language Arts. She said to pay attention to the reading classes during college preparation and enjoy the other classes. One of the “pearls” she gained from Mrs. Farmer was to talk to your students’ parents as if the students were your own children. I had no doubt that that is exactly how Suzanne felt.

2015

Suzanne was now in Cedar Hill Elementary School, and still teaching kindergarteners. She still had a para helping her.  In fact, all the kindergarten teachers in the school had paras. Even after all this time in the Atlanta area, she admitted to me that she gets a little homesick in the Fall because of the lack of Fall color in the South. Suzanne mentioned to me that her pay had frozen for five years.

She had a Smartboard in her classroom. The Smartboard was not just a projection tool. The students interacted with the board during various activities throughout the day. She was wearing a mic which amplified her voice for her hearing-impaired students. The walls of the room were almost completely filled. There were fewer students in this building than her past school, only 1,000, but that was down 300 students because a new elementary building was being constructed.  She had a field trip planned to the Atlanta Aquarium.  It was expensive.  Thirty-five dollars per student. She collected money to cover transportation and received a grant to cover the entry fee.

Contrasted with her students when I visited in 2008, most of the children could already read by October. They recognized a world map, used complete sentences and knew what a globe was. One of the features that did not change was the diversity of the student body.  An example of the classroom diversity was a Vietnamese boy, who spoke very little English. During the day, a fourth-grade student came into the class to help translate and teach the boy. This young lady took her role as teacher very seriously. Despite his lack of English language, both Suzanne and her para, Mrs. Gray, told me that his writing and Math skills were excellent.

Suzanne added some software in assisting her with classroom behavior. “ClassDojo” helped her quiet the class when it grew noisy^[3]. The computer gave off a “ding” when the students were “dinged” for behavior. When the students heard the ding, they quieted right down.

Similar to the other kindergarten teacher in this study, the students moved to other teachers for specials.  In this case, the students lined up to head to their Science teacher. Suzanne had prepared her students for my visit so I was not a “stranger” to them. That reminded me of a young girl in Suzanne’s class the first time I visited in 2008. During the day, as I watched the students working and learning, this young girl darted glances at me while I was taking notes. At the end of the day, she approached me and said she could say “hi” to me now that I was no longer a stranger.  Now I was her friend. It must be that I was accepted as a friend of their teacher immediately because four of the students, upon returning from their Science special, came up to me and hugged me.  My heart melted.  As a secondary teacher I was always a bit fearful of the supposed chaos of a kindergarten class and in wonder at the ability of kindergarten teachers in handling what I thought was the uncontrolled and impulsive atmosphere of a kindergarten classroom.  As a father, I knew that children at that age might be shy, but given a chance, also were accepting and without prejudice.