Making It Work.

The theme of this post shall be, “Making it Work.”

(See Future Post Entitled, "Winging It.")

I’ll begin with a clear and tangible example.

I’m taking a lot of John Feierabend’s music pedagogy methodologies and materials to design my curriculum this year. Quick disclaimer: I haven’t been able to actually be trained in this, I’ve only been able to attend a handful of workshops, talk to people, and read stuff with my eyeballs.

“Fingerplays” are beatful rhymes/chants that you say while acting out the story with your hands. Sometimes you can use puppets. While using these in the classroom my students have been able to practice listening, remembering, echoing, keeping a steady beat, playing with tone of voice, being artful with our hands, engaging our imaginations and other great things that I probably don’t even realize.

Here’s a fingerplay that we used this week:

For the first character you use a very high voice, and the second character a very low voice.

1: Where are you going Big Pig, Big Pig?

2: Out in the garden to dig, dig, dig!

1: Out in the garden to dig, dig, dig! Shame on you Big Pig, Big Pig!

2: I’m sorry Ma’am but I’m only a pig, and all I can do is dig, dig, dig!

(Look, here’s a video of someone doing it on youtube. I don’t know why.)

So I went into my little box of stuffed animals/puppets…(I’ve been slowly adding to this collection but in order for a stuffed animal/puppet to make it in it has to be really cute, able to move in an artful way, clean looking, and cheap… so my collection is still small. However, I think I’ve finally figured out what to do with my giant and guilt-filled Beanie Baby Collection…)

So I’m looking and looking, bear, lion, hummingbird, bear again, crab…

No pigs.

But… I did have a Rhino and a Butterfly.

Alex promptly said to me, “But… why would a Rhino and a Butterfly be together?”

And I said, “Animals don’t really talk. So I think we can continue to suspend our disbelief and pretend that the talking animals-Rhino and Butterfly- exist in a world where they interact.”

So the chant became this:

1: Where did you go Rhino, Rhino?

2: Out in the garden to stomp real slow.

1: Out in the garden to stomp real slow? Shame on you Rhino, Rhino!

2: Sorry Ma’am but I’m only a rhino, and all I can do is stomp real slow.

And what I learned after the first time I did this with preschoolers was that this chant opened up a whole variety of new things to talk about. First I could perform the chant for them and ask them what happened in the story-testing their listening and comprehension. And to take it even further, there is an emotional element involved that I never even considered! The Rhino is stomping on the flowers which the Butterfly needs to survive! So suddenly all the kiddos were like, “Jigga Whaaa! BAD RHINO NO NO NO!!”

AND THEN, I had one class come in who pointed at the butterfly on my finger and screamed in unison, “THAT’S A MONARCH BUTTERFLY!!!!!” and then spent the next 5 minutes shouting facts about, and experiences they’d had with, monarch butterflies-simultaneously while I sat on my carpet square cracking up and shouting back at their little faces, “THAT IS SO COOL!”

So… The moral of this blog post is:

I’m not going to be perfect at each lesson, I’m likely not going to have exactly the right materials, or maybe it’s a little too easy, or a little too hard for my students… but I will make it work in that moment to make sure that we can take away at least a tiny valuable moment. AND- it’s possible that by “making it work,” for my situation, the result will be even better than if things had been laid out perfectly to begin with.

Ohhh Yeahh.

I’ma go out in the garden to stomp real slow now.

xoxox

Karlie

PS: This was the first week that every single Kindergartener got up and danced alone during our greeting. And for some reason, every single girl thinks that dancing is actually going into the middle of the circle and doing a backbend. Fair enough.