Educating ourselves

One of the things Reggie and Lucy and I have enjoyed so much at Fulton this year is the preschool that Sheree runs in her home for a couple of hours every Thursday morning. As each child arrives, Sheree puts a sticker on their right hand and their right foot and they do a little obstacle course across the room with hopping and jumping and rolling. (A consequence of this is that now when Lucy finds stickers at home, she sticks them all to her feet. Because that’s just what you do with stickers.) Then all the kids play until everyone has arrived; with duplo or a toy kitchen or cars or a medical kit or bead-threading or playdough.

Then preschool always starts in the same way: Sheree has everyone sit on the mat in a circle and stand up one at a time and introduce themselves with their name and age. Reggie wouldn’t do it, for the longest time, despite what felt like endless coaxing, but then he started practicing at home, when it wasn’t preschool, jumping on our bed and shouting, ‘My name is Reggie and I am three years old!!’ Then finally, one day partway through this semester, he surprised us all by standing up at preschool and announcing, in the littlest voice, ‘My name is Reggie and I am three years old and I am from Fiji.’ My heart almost melted with proudness that he’d finally had the confidence to do it. But also, he thinks he’s from Fiji!! (A couple of the bigger kids (who usually go to school but come to preschool during the holidays) will do elaborate formal introductions with their name and age and where they’re from and who their parents are, etc. so he’s obviously been listening.)

After introductions, Sheree will do some music and songs with the kids, read a story, do some counting or shapes with a blackboard or puzzles, and teach a new letter and its sound every week. Usually she will give them a worksheet to practice writing a letter or number, and this is how it came to be that Reggie wrote his name for the first time. I held his hand to show him the G, but the rest is all him. He hasn’t done it again since but there’s the rest of his life for that. He has lately started recognising the letters of his name in other words and claiming them as his own, so I figure that’s something.

This amazing rocket is actually from Asher’s space-themed birthday party but the kids have had endless fun with it at preschool since.

Often Sheree will also set up painting or some kind of science-y activity. One of my favourites was using a mix of cornflour and water with drops of food colouring to practice colour mixing. The colour mixing itself was great fun, but the way cornflour and water ‘paste’ behaves is fascinating: it can’t decide whether it’s a solid or a liquid. In any case, I feel I’ve learned as much as the kids this year and I’m so inspired to organise myself and use these ideas going forward.

In fact, we did a field trip to the river a couple of weeks ago and it was rather like the nature school concept I’ve been hearing about recently. I’ve been talking to Brent all year about how I want to start something like that when we get back to New Zealand so it was such a great experience to see how Sheree put it into action.

There were probably half a dozen grown ups and three times as many kids. We crossed the river and then walked up a little creek. Sheree told the kids to look out for tadpoles and water striders and butterflies, and there was great joy whenever any of these creatures were sighted.

When we got to our turn-around point, I let Lucy out of the backpack to try her feet in the water (she loved it) and Sheree gave gummy frogs to anyone who’d seen the relevant critters (everyone).