Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning

by Diamond, Julie

  I cannot get there fast enough.

  And sometimes when my mother

  Is scolding my big brother,

  My secret place, it seems to me,

  Is quite the only place to be.4

  In the afternoon, I made copies of the poem, and they illustrated it.

  Teachers who are alive to the themes in books and poems can continually help make associations: “Isn’t that like . . .” Teachers can notice when themes in certain books resonate; these books are likely to end up bent and worn with use.5 When children are introduced to books in this way, through connections that are immediate and personal, they grow to become the kinds of readers who consistently bring to books their strong feelings about events in their own lives. They become readers for whom books are powerful sources of information and understanding.

  While children love talking about things that have happened to them, they also are drawn to discussions of moral dilemmas, if the issues are put in terms that are relevant to them. Fairy tales, in particular, raise these problems, and certain questions take children to the heart of the story. In the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, the girl makes a deal with the little man: if he spins the straw into gold for her, she’ll give him her firstborn baby. Afterward, she marries the king, has a baby, and forgets her promise. When the little man comes for the baby, she tries to get out of her promise. A question arises: if the little man did what he said he’d do, was it OK for her to break her promise? Is it sometimes OK to break a promise, to go back on your word?

  Fairy tales teach children that moral decisions are not simple matters. When Little Red Riding Hood is going to her grandmother’s house, the wolf encourages her to stop in the woods to gather flowers. The wolf exploits her innocence and goodness. (In a number of fairy tales, innocence and good intentions are punished.) Is the wolf completely to blame, or does Red Riding Hood share responsibility? Should she have known better and followed her mother’s instructions to go directly to her grandmother’s house? In Lon Po Po, a Chinese version of a Red Riding Hood story, the eldest of three sisters tricks the wolf and ends up killing him: the girls pull him in a basket to the top of a tree and then drop the basket. Was that cruel, or did the wolf deserve his fate? Or could both things be true?

  In the book Heckedy Peg (a made-up fairy tale) as in Lon Po Po, children are left at home when the mother goes out (where’s the father in these stories?). The children disobey their mother’s injunctions, first playing with fire, then opening the door to a witch, who turns them into different foods. In Heckedy Peg, it’s the mother who saves the children, pretending to cut off her legs, as the witch has insisted, and then recognizing her children in their disguised forms. The family returns home joyously, but did the children invite their fate because they’d been disobedient? What about the mother’s having left them alone in the first place? Does her knowledge of her children, and the lengths to which she’ll go to save them, make up for having left them? Children’s answers are varied, individual, and refer to their own lives as well as what they know from the text itself. Their responses show that they can recognize and appreciate moral shadings, and these discussions give them the chance to weigh costs and options.

  Many children’s books contain elements of ambiguity. This is most obvious in books that end with the main character waking up, forcing the reader to wonder whether it was all a dream or it really happened: Hey, Get Off Our Train; No Jumping on the Bed; George Shrinks; The Quilt. At the end of these books, I ask the children: was it a dream, or real? Their reasoning pulls us back to details of text or illustrations. Ambiguity and ambivalence are, after all, characteristics of experience, and stories with elements of ambiguity allow children to better appreciate the complexities of their own lives.

  Often discussions of books bring to mind other books: Yesterday, I read Hey, Get Off Our Train: it was one of those lovely periods when the children are somehow able to muse, and to do it in a group. One response led to another. Oh, someone said, look, the animals get larger, like in Bark, George.

  Allowing time for this kind of musing is crucial, I think. It implies the teacher’s trust in the children to “get it.” It recognizes the importance of letting talk go; it shows faith in their ability to consider, to take things seriously—to make their own experience something that can be at the center of school, of work.

  Books open up a space in which children can consider a vast array of meanings—moral, aesthetic, emotional. By grappling with that content, by immersing themselves in the multiple worlds offered in books, children build powerful links between what they already know and think and some new and more complex thought or construction. As they talk about books, they attend to the plot, to each other, to spoken language, and to possible interpretations. They add to and qualify each other’s remarks, and their insights accumulate. Reading books becomes a common endeavor; by the end of the year, it involves all the children, even those whose receptive and expressive language is poorer. Talking about books in this way helps create a pool of knowledge and associations.

  Our aim, in the course of the year, is to help children build up the ability to listen to each other. To accomplish this, teachers must perform an impossible task: balance relevance and accountability with the openness that allows children to develop their thoughts. If teachers intervene too often or too persistently, children may be discouraged from pursuing their own thoughts or building on others’ thinking. If we never ask questions, reframe statements, or ask for clarification or comments, we end up with self-referential and rambling talk, and children become bored and cease to listen. I want to give children space for personal expression and exploratory comments, while at the same time fostering their development of discussion skills and the ability to respect other speakers and add to discussions.

  How do we help children participate in discussions as listeners and speakers? In pursuing this goal, teachers must be flexible, at times insisting on raised hands, at other times allowing children to jump in. We have to judge the quality of discussions. Are children interpreting? Are they responding to each other? Our long-term goal is for children to learn to attend to narrative in an active way, to choose what merits particular attention, and to ask, What did that mean? Perhaps children’s development of the ability to interpret is fostered when they bring to conversations about books, and eventually to their own reading, a readiness for the unexpected.

  Themes in Literature

  I’ve been reading Leo Lionni books to them—today A Color of His Own, yesterday Fish Is Fish, especially appropriate because of our tadpoles. I said, before beginning to read, I want you to think about the things that are the same in A Color of His Own and the other Leo Lionni books. Afterward, the comments were wonderful: there are two animals that get together; one animal wants to change, to be different from who he is (also true for Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse and for the snail in The Biggest House in the World). I add that they want to change because they aren’t happy being who they are, which is definitely a Lionni theme. Denay adds that the characters in Little Blue and Little Yellow also change—and are also together—and their being together is what makes them change. Denay produces this synthesis, yet it’s built on what everyone had said before.

  One of the first books I read every fall is Lionni’s Little Blue and Little Yellow. The two friends are torn paper circles. One day, Little Blue says good-bye to his family and goes off to find Little Yellow. When they find each other, they hug—and as they overlap, they turn green and become one circle. They return to their homes, going first to Little Blue’s house, and then Little Yellow’s, but both families reject them: “Where is our Little Blue?” “Where is our Little Yellow?”

  At this point, the children are mesmerized, struck by the tragedy. Independence, so developmentally significant a goal, is not without risks. This short book with its cheery colors dramatically lays out the potential losses in life. Happily for the two friends, the solution comes—ironically, through their sadness. They cry
, and their tears are torn yellow and blue scraps. They pull the pieces together to become once more Little Blue and Little Yellow, their old, separate, primary-color selves, whereupon their glad parents welcome them.

  So many themes in this one book: friendship, identity, transformation, loss and abandonment, perseverance, recognition, home. What strikes me, too, is the unity between the themes and Lionni’s collaged illustrations. The torn edge, Lionni wrote in his autobiography, “gave a certain vitality.” 6 The illustrations are simple and uncluttered, in tune with the seriousness of the themes, and colorful and bouncy, in tune with the playfulness of the characters. Lionni made up the story for this, his first children’s book, when he was taking care of his young grandchildren for the first time. Heading home with them on the train, he tore pages from a magazine to illustrate his story, and story and illustrations retain the immediacy of a grandfather’s voice. This unity of spirit between illustration and theme is a hallmark of many of the finest children’s books.

  Lionni, in his autobiography, writes that as he continued to produce books for children, he “became ever more conscious of the problems children face and the importance of the messages we send to them.” 7 At times, Lionni’s books can be didactic. But children tune out the more explicit messages and take in his ability to speak to their concerns.

  Other authors, too, write about transformations. The plots of many of William Steig’s books hinge on magical changes (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and The Amazing Bone). Certain authors write books that lend themselves to analysis by children: Steig, with his magic pebbles and talking wishbones. Do children especially like transformation—is that why these writers take it as a topic? Perhaps the subject has weight for children because their lives are all the time transforming. Children certainly have a transforming effect on us, parents and teachers, making us act better or sometimes worse, pressing us always to do some magic to make life be what they want it to be—utterly pleasurable, utterly fair.

  Children’s books present other significant themes—separation and reconciliation, rejection and acceptance, independence and connection, conflict, irreconcilable differences, power and vulnerability. Are these themes so different from those that form the basis of books that adults love? If we care about children’s reading, our concern has to be with two goals that trump other goals: reading for pleasure and reading for the recognition of personal meaning (and these are undoubtedly connected).

  When we support these goals, we find children choosing a vast range of books: books about princesses, books about dinosaurs, books about cars and rocket ships. One year, each time we went to the school library to borrow books, one boy chose books about war: armies, soldiers, World War II bombers, tanks, and missiles. His interest propelled other boys in the same direction, and as the class returned from each library visit, several five-year-old boys would be clutching books about war. This boy showed similar concerns in the classroom: building with blocks or other construction materials, he never failed to include spots for weapons. Although I sought to understand why defense mattered so much to him, and attempted, when we went to the library, to draw him toward other sorts of books, I didn’t tell him no, no more army books, no more books about guns. For this child, the theme of defense and protection was paramount, and he looked for books that addressed it. Whatever it is that influences our choice of books, I have come to see that a censoring interference with choice can have the consequence of weakening the literary alliances we want to build, alliances between teacher and children, between a child and other children—alliances that, over time, may enlarge a child’s sense of what books offer.

  We may influence children’s choices, but we don’t have the power to dictate what moves them. We do have other powers: to note which books they pick out, to consider carefully the books we decide to read to the class, to craft the questions we ask, and to listen carefully to the points children make during book discussions. Last, we can bring to these decisions and discussions our own openness to the topics children care about, which are, after all, recurrent human themes: the struggle against adversity in Brave Irene, the ambivalence about parental love in The Runaway Bunny. Certainly there are appropriate books that address children’s concerns about defense and safety.

  Just as adults have favorite books, a class may discover a book to which it responds passionately. At the beginning of this year, I’d read the class Bark, George, by Jules Feiffer. On the first page, the mother dog commands her puppy to bark. Instead, the puppy issues a variety of barnyard oinks, baas, and moos. The children howled with laughter at the comical incongruity of sounds; they roared when the mother, exasperated, covers her ears with her paws. Desperate, she brings her son to a vet, who reaches down the puppy’s throat and pulls out animal after animal. I read the book several times, and each time, the children responded. Seeing their gleeful reaction, I looked for other books with elements of transgressive humor: No Jumping on the Bed and No, David. The children were delighted with these characters (who refused to obey or, in the case of the dog George, were unable to obey). The children’s shared response helped define them as a class. Though I lent my conscious support, it was the books themselves, their themes and humor, that brought the children together.

  Literacy Goals

  We made bookmarks for Father’s Day. I said they were to be for an “important male person in your life.” Denay made hers for her three-year-old brother, writing—a perfect sample of authentic writing!—You always make a mess.

  Each year, a number of children in my class begin to read and write. I’m honest with parents when I meet with them at the start of the school year: I don’t expect children to start reading and writing in kindergarten. My ambitions are both smaller and larger. I want children to think about books and talk about books; I want them to know the difference between fiction and nonfiction, to care about the characters and their motives, to use books for research. I want them to develop, or build on, a love of books that will last a lifetime. I want my students to see writing as something that’s natural to them, whether they are taping notes on classroom walls or labeling their buildings. I want children to learn alphabet letters and most of the sounds, and to gain a sight vocabulary of words they can recognize (the names of children in the class, and some of the words that appear in the morning message). But, I emphasize to parents, my aims in this area are integrated with larger intellectual goals: children’s growth in confidence as learners, their growth in focus and a sense of resourcefulness; their development of a rich imaginative life; their growth in the ability to express what they believe and to integrate new information.

  In defining my purposes, I look back to curriculum guides from the 1950s through the 1980s. These guides recognized that, for young children, communication of experience matters more than acquisition of specific “decoding” skills. These earlier materials used the term “language arts” rather than “literacy,” with the implication that reading is not everything. Here is what Early Childhood Education, a pamphlet produced by the New York City Board of Education in 1958–1959, said:At the kindergarten level, oral rather than written communication is the foremost language need. During this period in a child’s life he is making complex social and emotional adjustments.... This physical and emotional development . . . may be interfered with if pressure is put on the child for the mastery of the mechanics of reading at this age.... The language program, therefore, emphasizes the development of concepts through experiences.8

  Similarly, in 1970 in The Teaching of Young Children: Some Applications of Piaget’s Learning Theory, teachers are advised against setting aside a period of the day for writing: “The opportunity to write when an interest and the desire to communicate is at its height will influence the quality of children’s writing. If children are required to write at certain times during the day, or every day, they will tend to write the empty and trivial.” 9

  In my classroom, children are engaged with language—with talk, books, writing—as o
ne part of a program of active making and doing. Language-related activities should be a part of a rich curriculum, not just a means to acquisition of literacy skills.

  Fish Juice: Talking, Reading, Writing, and Drawing About Real Things

  Brooke found an interesting page in one of the whale/dolphin books, a picture of whales stranded on a beach, with people, including kids, helping by pouring salt water onto the whales’ backs. She showed it to the class, and then I brought out a news clipping I’d saved about a dead whale on a Long Island beach. The article had been in my folder for over a month, but I kept forgetting to show them. This was the exact right moment. Caroline said, It’s a baleen whale! I asked the job people, Lila and Philip, to cut the picture out neatly and put it up on the bulletin board (I’d torn it out of the newspaper). When I looked up later, Lila had glued it on construction paper, made holes in the top corners, and hung it up with yarn, like a framed picture. Later I read them Amos and Boris, Steig’s story of a friendship between a mouse and a whale, a recycling of Aesop’s story of the lion and the mouse: when the whale is beached, his friend the mouse rounds up animals to push him back into the water.

  When children focus on real things, activities grow directly out of their desire to gain knowledge and to communicate. Reading and writing are seamlessly connected, and both are related to children’s talk and graphic representations. Children’s explorations—through their talk, reading, writing, drawing, construction—can be the dynamic center of classroom life, a part of each day. The teacher’s job is to anticipate where these studies can take the class (and as noted earlier, to put in place routines and structures that allow children to explore).

  By reading, I mean the use of books. In the spring, we began our study of undersea life by adding to the class library nonfiction books about undersea creatures. When we visited the school library, children searched for books on their subjects. Over several days, I read the class Baby Whale’s Journey, a book that is as suspenseful as any fiction book in its telling of the baby whale’s birth and survival. The story spilled over into drawings and writing. Rosie wrote, “Baby whales are born alive.” Other children drew the mother whale pushing her baby up to the surface to breathe. They wrote down their questions: Graham and Denay came up with the question, Are whales and dolphins different? As we studied undersea animals, children used quiet reading time to go back, again and again, to specific books. Once again, the shelf next to my chair was piled high with books, the “saved” pages marked with Post-its.