Introduction
In American culture tales of the Wild West are almost mythic in stature. There is lawlessness, chaos, a promise of great riches, and a rooting tooting good time. That’s a lot like teaching kindergarten. Lawlessness: many kids come in without a framework for how to behave in a group, much less a school. It takes a little time and a lot of work from the sheriff (I mean teacher) to set things right. Chaos: I imagine that kindergarten is very much like a cattle drive. Members of the herd keep trying to drift off in at least nineteen directions at once. You’ve got to keep your lasso close at hand to wrangle them back together. Great riches: I’m not talking gold here; I’m talking ideas. Kindergarteners are amazingly open to sharing their ideas. This gives me, as a teacher, a rare and wonderful view of connections being formed within their minds. Finally, a rooting tooting good time: just as the west was a great frontier, so too can kindergarten be a frontier. It is like a frontier on multiple levels. To the students a new class is a new land full of strange and wonderful people and things. To the educator the students are unknown, with vast potential to discover. Teaching kindergarten is exhausting work but the students’ growth, the freedom for creativity, and the just plain fun that kindergarten allows makes it all worthwhile.
I work at Kathleen Wilbur Elementary School in Bear, Delaware. Wilbur is a K-5 public school of almost 1,200 students. The school draws from a fairly wide stretch of geography in the Colonial School District. Our 1,200 come from a variety of social and economic backgrounds. This naturally makes the pool of common background knowledge relatively shallow and I will be spending a fair amount of time developing background knowledge for lessons in this unit. I am a kindergarten teacher at Wilbur, though in the past I have also taught third and fourth grade as well. Wilbur has nine kindergarten classes and our class sizes fluctuate between 16 and 22 students. My class last year consisted of 19 students, 10 female and 9 male. Of that class, I had a student who received support for speech, students who received services as English Language Learners (ELL) and one child who needed extra support for behavioral issues. I anticipate a similar class make-up this year.
When I saw the description for Jessica Brantley’s Literature and Information seminar, I felt it would be a fantastic fit for my kindergarten curriculum. The seminar focuses on including both literary text and nonfiction text in the teaching of reading. Indeed we blurred the lines between the two. We examined nonfiction text that was written with narrative traits such as figurative language. We also dissected literature that was rich with history and we could pull from it facts and information about a topic. Seminar leader Brantley wrote “the kinds of skills required to read are not divisible into neat categories”. This is perfect for kindergarten because five and six year olds do not have any concept of these different categories. In fact, one of our jobs in kindergarten is to begin developing an awareness of different types of text for our students. But, much as we did in seminar, so too in kindergarten can we blur these lines we draw. The focus in my class will be to have the students identify fiction and nonfiction through their particular mechanics (narrative elements in fiction, table of contents and charts in nonfiction) while twining both types together to teach a concept. This approach will allow me to divide the reading materials into categories without dividing the “skills required to read”. So it’s time for me to saddle up, and begin blurring some lines, building some connections, and developing a unit that’ll have more kick than a sarsaparilla.
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