Transitions, Grief, and Adult Scaffolding

 

“David, will you help me build a house?,” CS petitioned, collected some connecting sticks and spheres nearby.  “Sure!  As soon as I’m done helping JA, I’ll help you!”  

“Cody, I am building a house!,” says JA, with a bright smile across his face.  

“I see that, JA! You look like you feel excited about it,” I reply. 

 “Yeah, and David is helping me!,” he says, while admiring the beginnings of CS’s house adjacent to him.  

Episodes such as this one have been scattered throughout the past three weeks, ever since we have moved from the Infant House.  This is not a little transition, and it comes with not a little grief.  To lose the habitation of one’s environment, one which you spend some 25-35 hours a week, only to inhabit a new environment, devoid of many of the relationships you’ve cherished, requires a great deal of energy.

In the midst of this heavy load, children often return to the adults around them for safety, comfort, and play.  Whereas they normally would interact a lot more with one another and provide one another with provocations, their attention turns to their caregivers, who represent strong pillars of their mental and emotional worlds.  In essence, when confronted with loss and the unknown, children return to what is most known, most consistent, most reliable- adults.  

This return has been evident over the past few weeks, as I have noticed a steady increase in how often teachers are invited into play, when their peers may have served that role before.  Within such a dynamic, teachers find more opportunity to scaffold learning as they co-construct ideas with the children more closely.  What that has looked like are guided reflections on the learning that has taken place (by looking at videos and pictures, along with sharing anecdotes), but it has also looked like research, as we explore ideas that we have not yet thought through.  

All of those instances provide fertile ground for adult-child scaffolding to happen.  Sometimes you need scaffolding to construct something new, and sometimes you need it to return to something familiar.  Either way, construction happens, and as a result, emerging understandings come to fruition. They are such resilient learners!

December 30, 2020

“Children need simple, truthful, empathetic, but direct responses, especially when they are testing and learning limits. (p.17) -Elevating Childcare/Lansbury

This quote resonates on many levels with me as an educator, guide, community member, and human. When I hear a truth spoken in the world, I feel it intuitively when it resounds in my heart and body. Sometimes hearing a truth even brings tears to my eyes. It is a quiet feeling, yet unshakably strong. I believe children have an innate ability to see, hear, feel, and speak truth in a unique way in comparison to adults. Children have such an innate, unfiltered, desire to learn. This translates to their ability to hear a truth and be able to accept a particular reality pertaining to that : even if it is not what they might wish.

This relates to a preschool setting where there are a community of learners with differing needs and wants. If each member of the group is able to feel safe and speak their “truth” then a compromise can be attained. I believe it is our job as adults to model the tools (words/actions) necessary to articulate feelings, needs, and wants. As a guide, I strive to help children take a seemingly impossible situation and boil it down to the root or baseline of the problem. Throughout this process a number of resolutions can become available. These undertakings do not exist within the realms of black/ white thinking, rather in the infinite shades and possibilities of grey. There is no single “right or wrong” way to solve a problem. This is even true in mathematics.

I learned in Graduate School math classes that when breaking down a story problem, proportional reasoning made the most sense to me; whereas for others an algebraic equation was a solution. I needed to see pictorially the problem drawn out and the components of the drawing at play. Both ways for solving the problem arrived at the exact same answer. This metaphor translates to the classroom when guiding children through the problem solving process. It is imperative to allow each child to express their authentic self, while simultaneously respecting each others' boundaries. There is always an opportunity to grow as a group in these instances, and learn how to exist peacefully.

It's Just the Beginning...

December 28, 2020

As I sat quietly reading in the office on my first day at the preschool, I was able to begin observing (auditory) the flow of the mid-morning routine after outside time. OP chose a book for Cody to read to the group about mindfulness. It felt inspiring to listen and notice how receptive the children were to putting collective deep breathing into practice. Also it was a great time naturally (after outside play) to come back “into their bodies” before the lunch transition. I noticed how the sounds of the deep breathing exercises brought with it the overall quieting down of sounds from the next room.

Practicing mindfulness and stretching poses can begin to give children powerful and effective tools to utilize when they are beginning to explore self-regulation with their bodies and emotions. I believe these tools can assist us as human beings in general throughout our lives no matter what age or phase of life we are in. Empowering preschool age children to take ownership for their body, mind, and spirit is just the beginning of a profound lifelong journey in traveling the distance from the head to the heart.