Last Sunday, March 2nd, preparations for the school week began with a happy miracle of synchronicity. I was shopping for materials for the 1st grade in the mall at Multiplaza in Escazu, and I found what I wanted, but I was not going to have time to prepare the materials for Monday taking the bus back home. I had acquired a set of large number squares (all in pink) covering the digits 1-9 and 0, and I had 10 different colored paints that I needed to use to paint the squares before we used them to enrich our many layered sensory and imaginative experience of the numbers. However, there was no way I was going to get back to San Mateo on the bus from San Jose before 9 or 10pm to do the painting that I needed to do. Then suddenly, I wandered into a small store in the mall selling equipment for babies and saw two our of school parents and their children standing right in front of me! We quickly coordinated our shopping plans, and I rode back up to San Mateo with them early. I got home by 6pm, so I had all the time I needed to paint our numbers before class on Monday.
Most certainly, I could have waited until Tuesday to present the large painted numbers to the first grade, but my intention is to move the first grade forward as quickly as it is possible for each one of them to grow and develop as fully as they each are able to on every level. One of my specialities is making memorization and mastery of the abstract fun and easy through use of the metaphorical and the tangible. Without giving the 1st grade any homework, I am hopeful that they might possibly be able to finish mastering their times tables through 12 times 12 by the end of first grade even though we are still working on counting up to 100 and basic addition, right now. There is no child in class yet who can count out loud in English successfully up to 144 (or even to 50) without missing any numbers, but I still believe they can all learn that 12 times 12 is 144 by the end of the year. If they don't all make it there by December, that is fine, there will be no real suffering over it, but if they are able to make it to this hidden goal, they will discover great fun and pride in their work in doing so. Time will tell. And the magic helping me accelerate my schedule as a teacher on Sunday gives me even more renewed hope and faith in what is possible.
We had great fun playing with the numbers all week. On our river adventure on Thursday, the students found both a fish and a stick out of which they were able to make perfect silhouettes of the numbers 3 and 7. The fish, bent into a curve with a fin sticking out on its side, forms the shape of the number 3 (as does the sea horse in another manner), and the 7 is easy to find in fallen branches and in the shape of the cashew nuts growing all around Ecovilla. In honor of the cashew nut, as our leading symbol for the number 7, all the students took turns with the orange spray paint can spraying the number-7-shaped-stick orange. They also had many opportunities to draw our number symbols this week with their perfectly colored crayon sets. Those ten symbols and colors are as follows (ordered from the top down reflecting our future rainbow latter up to the tree house):
(9) The Pink Flamingo
(8) The Red Jamaica Flower
(7) The Orange Cashew Fruit
(6) The Yellow Banana (or the yellow baby chicken)
(5) The Lime Green Slice of Fruit (still attached to a twig and leaf forming the shape of the number 5)
(4) The Mint Green Twigs (naturally growing in the shape of the number 4)
(3) The Turquoise Sea Horse
(2) The Indigo or Dark Blue Swan
(1) The Purple or Lavender Flower
(0) The Brown Egg on the Brown Ground
For Science this year, the first grade curriculum from Tree of Life is built around 7 core concepts. There are four types of physical objects, non-living earth and stone, living plants, moving animals, and people who choose professions as adults (that's the way the text presents people, NI MODO!). These are really just modern interpretations of the ancient ideas about the worlds of (1) solid, melancholic, mineral earth full of the hidden layers of geological memory and history, (2) phlegmatic, rhythm driven, steady plant growth, (3) sanguine, moving, animate, animal life, and (4) choleric, ego-strengthened, human will. In addition to these four types of material bodies, the first grade Tree of Life science curriculum from Fusion asks the first grade to recognize the 3 phases of matter in solid, liquid and gas forms. Again, this has ancient roots in the ideas of cardinal, fixed, and mutable existence. If you know the zodiac it is easy to see the entire first grade curriculum through the lens of metaphor in the 12 houses.
Cancer, cardinal water, would be the SOLID WATER glacier feeding new fresh water streams and creating a stable structure for an ecosystem (or home) on the land. Scorpio, fixed water, would be the deep ocean to which all rivers return and from which the clouds are filled with rain. Pisces, mutable water, would be the rain clouds of water vapor moving quickly and dropping rain where ever they go. With all of this imagery in mind, I can see in each moment of class how much of the first grade science curriculum we are covering in any lesson. I am keeping constant track of it all with my end goals even in mind to help me reverse engineer our path towards these goals. In working with the numbers right now in different ways (for example), sometimes I have the students working more on relating the numbers to plants (mint plants and cashew nuts grow of course, but they are not fast moving like animals) and sometimes they are working more on relating the numbers to animals (sea horses and swans grow and move fast!) through art and exploration (in the afternoons mostly), and sometimes I have them working on hardcore arithmetic calculations without so much focus on metaphorical visualization (in the mornings mostly).
In terms of adding numbers, the first grade achieved a comfortable habit life of differentiated instruction this week without really realizing that they each are working on different levels as individuals. I would like the parents to refrain from drawing the children's attention to the fact they are now doing math at different skill levels. I respect your freedom to do as you wish, but I also exercise my freedom in respectfully making such requests. The children will realize that they are working on different levels themselves over time, but we as adults would better serve the child in my opinion by not emphasizing these differences or making it seem that we care about them too much. Ignore it in conversation with the children as much as possible please.
One of my favorite quotes says that "the race of life is long, and in the end it is only with ourselves." I do not cultivate a spirit of competition in class but rather a spirit of comradery, cooperation, and individual excellence. As long as all the first grade students can add and subtract all the number combinations between 1 and 20 this year, they are entitled to a grade of an A according to Costa Rican MEP standards and Waldorf 1st grade expectations. However, the children do not need to learn about grades. They will mostly all be working on their own customized extra credit levels beyond grade level standards, so we shouldn't distract them with the emotional burden of thinking about grades and what they mean at this time.
In order to prepare the students to invent their own division problems later this year that are divisible by 3 without any remainders, I have them all adding up the digits of each number from 10 on up to see how high and how fast they can each successfully go. Two students got up into the 60's this week adding 6 + 0, 6 + 1, 6 + 2, and that whole series. Other students are still in the 20's. That is fine. No one has yet fully discovered the pattern so that they can continue to write their own problems without my help, but I bet that some students will master this ability this week, learning again that they are learning more than one thing at a time in each class. When I decide this activity is over, it is okay that some students will have added much bigger numbers than others and ultimately combinations of three digits (1 + 1 + 1 for problem 111, and yes!, 111 is divisible by 3), while other students will not yet get to add three digits together at this time and will finish with only two digits. What matters is that everyone is fully engaged in class and learning appropriately on their own level.
Just as math and science are interwoven so that the students think they are still working on numbers even when they are working on science, in the same way the students move gently between alphabet mastery and virtues lessons or 7 habits training. Later their reading will also include reading their science text books. Still, the overt theme during virtues lessons is letters and reading. The students really only know that they have different alphabet classes and numbers classes and even these two differences will fuse together into one whole a some points in the future. This is important for parents to know because I heard one parent asking her son what his favorite class subject was. He answered, "I like it when we make the sound for everyone to be silent, and we go into silent working time." I have I melody that I hum to the students in what I believe is a minor tone inspired by Hebrew music which is my signal with the kids that it is time to move into focused quietness with me. We count to ten silently on our fingers together after we finish humming the tone. They love it. They even use the activity in their own games and after school spontaneously to achieve calm and quietness amongst each other.
I share all of this with you to bring your attention as parents to the fact that even though on the schedule there are clear and hard lines between subject areas, it is important to realize that this is not the experience the child and I create together even when we do in fact transition seamlessly to different subject areas. We have a wholeness together where everything connects to everything else. I would say, let us not rush to chop up this wholeness into parts in their minds. The children will see the parts separately later, but let them experience the wholeness of interdisciplinary interconnectedness first before they realize that there are separate parts and separate academic disciplines. If they have the whole in their minds, the whole will always prove more productive for them than the sum of the parts. The different academic subject areas feed each other. The students don't need to think that they love one subject and hate another. Strengthens can support weaknesses so that they can all love the entire learning process.
The virtues that the children worked on this week were the active virtues of cooperation and helpfulness along with the equally important passive virtues of acceptance and detachment. Our children have tons of fun in school, but they don't always get what they want, and this is also good for them. They are quickly developing the character to be able to accept that sometimes they have to move on faster than they want to and sometimes they have to finish drawing something for now when they don't want to be finished. At other times, they have to be patient with something like recorder (flute) playing that may seem boring to them but that when they think about it is actually teaching them many things simultaneously.
Some students were worried this week that when they were learning to play 2 notes on the recorder with their Spanish teacher that they were only learning to play two notes for a very long time. We talked about this as a whole class, and we learned together about how there are many reasons for everything. The children discovered together that they are also learning more Spanish in music class while they are practicing their notes. They are also learning how to play together at the same time, which is much harder than learning to play two notes alone. And they are learning to be patient while still paying attention, which is a complicated combination of virtues. In the 7 habits book, we read about how Sammy the Squirrel learned that he had to be proactive in managing his own perspective to create his own happiness with the resources available to him, and our students are quickly learning the same thing. I am proud of them. They even quote back our virtues lessons to me (mostly after school) when it appears to them them I may need a reminder of such things! We have a great time.
Along with this blog I am including a few photos for you of our work this week. I welcome your feedback, public or private. I am thick-skinned as a veteran of many years of teaching, and I am comfortable with the fact that we might not all be happy all of the time. If you get mad at me sometimes, I won't hold it against you. It is naturally to have strong emotions relating to your children's experiences. However, if I don't feel comfortable answering some questions or engaging with some comments, I might not always respond. Sometimes that seems best.
The children and I changed one of our initial class proverbs from "you get what you get and you don't get upset" to "you get what you get and you don't throw a fit" (meaning we don't derail productivity, sabotage cooperation, or do anything destructive) because we realized together that no one is going to stop their feelings from flowing, but we should all learn to handle our feelings with dignity and maturity without throwing a fit. It is a fractal universe, so we can be sure that what we learn in first grade applies on many other levels to all of life. We teach the first graders together, but they also teach us too as they apply their life lesson whole heartedly. May we all grow and prosper together.
Sincerely,
Sky
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