The Greatness of Student Sharing and Positive Reinforcement

The Triumph:  Today we set up a bulletin board in the hallway for the Kindergarten open house.  We created some spring art for our hallway and I went in to the hall to start putting our wall together.  A student that I have been struggling with decided to come in the hallway with me and was an awesome helper.  He ended up taking charge and designing a majority of the wall!  I was so impressed with his involvement, and the positiveness that he showed me through that experience.  This student needs so many experiences with positive reinforcement and I was glad to have such a great experience with him where he could take charge.

The Struggle: I was shown by the full time Kindergarten intern today the amount of snacks that her class brought in after a note was sent home to families.  The inequity between our two classrooms is immense. The other Kinder classroom at our school is a full-time program, where families pay money to send their students to school all day everyday ( and yes this is a cheaper alternative to daycare!).  It is crazy to think that my kindergarteners and the full-time kindergarteners will be going into the same 1st grade classrooms.  At this point my students have had half the amount of time that full-time students have been to school, and that difference will exist when they are joined in the same classroom.

The Ludicrousness:  This is so kindergarten.  During our writing time we have been making books.  I taught a writing lesson today about adding details and talked about how writers add details to their pictures and their words to make their books more interesting and exciting to the reader.  Well, during sharing I had each student share one detail that was added or included to show a detail.  One student in particular started his sharing about his book that he started today.  A book about war.  A book about, as he quoted "the war between his people (the U.S. and the Nazi's."  WHAT?!?!  I could not even believe that he knew what a Nazi was.  What is this kid watching at home?!  And boy did he keep on sharing about the Nazi's and how the soldiers in his country fought against them.  I tried as hard as I could to keep a straight face and to get him to move on so the next student could share.  Sometimes I really wonder what these kids do at home and what types of things they can watch on T.V.!!!!!