It was interesting to see the planning form they are using.

To answer some questions: They opened in 1919 (there are people 80-90 years old still living in Baralles who went to CK way back when. CK has been working with Reggio ideas since 2009. Since then they have had over 50% turn over of staff.

The environment I liked better than NMSD Santa Fe (and ABQ), but the long term project work in Santa Fe showed more advanced use of graphical languages and panel creation techniques.

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If you have the time to post on the questions in this diary, the results can be added to our documentation meta project.

(Some of the children from NMSD Albuquerque go to day school or boarding school at NMSD Santa Fe for their schooling after Kindergarten. Some of them go to a magnet school for the deaf. Some of them go to a charter school for the deaf. Some of the teachers at NMSD Santa Fe live in Rio Rancho or Bernalillo and commute to NMSD Satna Fe by train. They chaperone some of the commuting children on the train.)

NMSD Santa Fe is more than 125 years old. Lars Larson founded the school in order to provide quality education for the deaf of New Mexico. He himself was deaf and the gym, the most popular building on campus, is named after him.

The campus is beautiful with homey cottages for boarding students and high quality facilities. In the boy’s dormitory there is an art gallery that we were invited to see after the presentation, but I didn’t have time (had to get back to the babysitter).

When we neared the new early childhood building that they are very proud of, I was discouraged to see the toddler playground (18 mo – 3 years old) was all static prefab climbing structures over rubber mat with a little sandbox in the corner. They were interesting prefab pieces including water tables etc, but still a very boring play yard. I was worried that everything would turn out to be like that, and I am glad to say that it wasn’t all like that! They just redid the play yards for the older kids’ classrooms last year and they are not prefab at all. They feel like the comfy yard of a vacation home. Perhaps the renovation of the toddler yard will happen soon.

The building had the classrooms off a hall (rather than off an indoor piazza like at ABQ NMSD…I like the piazza set up better). Along the hall was a lot of long term documentation that looks like it represents high quality Reggio work, higher than I’ve seen in other settings I’ve visited in New Mexico. It looks like there are some long term research projects that all the classrooms explore over the year. This year there was one about portraits and one about shoes.

None of the preschool children were present when we visited. The first class we visited was the 18mo-2.5 room (note, sometimes the age groupings are switched, like a younger child might be moved up a class because of their language abilities etc). The spaces at ABQ NMSD seemed somewhat bare to me. It seemed like they had taken down cookie cutter classroom stuff, but were still in the process of learning how to make a visually/sensorally interesting space. At Santa FE NMSD, although the classrooms were still more institutional in feel that Rosalie, they had put a lot of consideration into making the spaces beautiful and homey, soft and interesting. They know how to use color well. They had glass jars of beautiful materials displayed. They had made interest areas that were not dependent on catalog materials alone (but used natural materials, recycled materials, homemade stuff etc). There had been a lot of documentation on the walls in the hall, but not much on the walls in the classroom. There were clear areas set up with provoking materials and questions for story workshop that would be happening the following morning. I will talk more about their story workshop presentation later, but just quickly story workshop partially involves setting up provoking materials that will inspire children to tell stories as they play with them (they have more restrictions about where you can use the materials and what can be used together than during free play). The teacher talked about how challenging it is to do long term project work with this age group particularly because of the lack of language that they may have as deaf children.

In the three year old classroom one story workshop provocation involved basins of sand, a fan to blow a spray mist over to the children working with the basins of sand and a collection of various materials that might be interesting for story telling in the sand with the water spray: blue glass rocks, plastic model animals… a bunch of stuff (didn’t grab my camera before the visit).

The stories the children tell are put into books constructed like we made the Winter Walk book (similar binding) with their words and photos on black paper. One story per book.

In one of the older classrooms the teacher had taped the inside of a large cardboard frame she had made to the light table then added a little bit of sand on top to allow for light table art.

The four lead teachers gave the presentation on story workshop. Story workshop was invented by the Opal School in Portland Oregon as an Americanized formula sort of a way to do Reggio-inspired work at a charter elementary school. (I would love to hear an Italian opinion on it.) I went to a workshop on story workshop at the 2011 NMAEYC preconference with Judy Graves from the Opal School. Some of the teachers from NMSD ABQ and NMSD Santa Fe went to the Opal school to learn story workshop.

Story workshop is a classroom structure that supports language and literacy development. It is the language development that is particularly of interest to the deaf schools as they serve many children who are behind in expressive and receptive language.

Story workshop can be adapted to different settings at NMSD Santa Fe, many of the teachers do story workshop in the morning on T and R and work on the long term investigations MWF. Having a day off in between from story workshop helps get the documentation done. The deaf children with special rights do a guided story workshop whereas the other children write their own stories through their play.

The process of story workshop is 1) preparation 2) provocation 3) investigation/negotiation 4) story creation 5) story congress.

1)      Preparation: The teachers set up a provocation for the children to play with that they think will invite story telling. The provocation is often based on something the children have been interested in, but sometimes it is based on something exciting the teacher discovered or a research hypothesis that the teachers’ have. With the children with special rights, often a book is used to guide the play into a story telling format instead of lower level play. Other provocations may also have books present, but not to have the stories copied, rather to inspire the creation of new stories. Older children do more writing as part of their story creating play. Usually, the story telling provocation has a little paper tent with a question on it such as “What stories can you find in these rocks?” With the youngest ones it is often guesswork as to what will draw them in, but once they are drawn in, the teacher starts asking questions to pull the stories out of them. As the children grow older and get more experience, the provocations continue to follow their interests, but also to try to provoke more and more sophisticated use of language and story telling (the last time we told stories, I noticed the children using dialog. That was a more sophisticated type of story telling than they had done before.)

2)      Explanation of the provocation. The teacher explains the provocation to a small group. For example, “Remember our field trip to see the birds. [looking at pictures] What was this bird? Remember its talons? Think of your story as you draw…”

3)      Invitation and negotiation: an overview of the materials available, and agreements about where time will be spent. The teachers write down the stories and photograph them as they happen. Later when the stories are read back, the children can make corrections. With the very young ones, they might take a picture and put it up on the wall and later ask the children what they were doing and this leads to an expanded version of the very basic story.

4)      Story creation. The children play with the provocations for 45 minutes. It is a time for looking for and finding stories from the child’s real and imaginary lives. Gaps in the process of storytelling become apparent to the teachers during play. The teacher helps pull out missing aspects, expand, value, add conversation and sequencing etc. When the NMSD teachers started doing story workshop it was hard. The children would say “I’m just playing.” Then they might give just a sentence, but over time, the documentation becomes a self-motivating factor and they write more and more and longer and longer stories and use more complex language and bigger vocabularies.

5)      Story Congress: The story is shared with the group. One child holds the book that was made and one child reads/tells the story. Then they receive feedback from the class and the teachers. (This is the part I was most interested in. I have felt like what Judy Graves talked about was well and good but I haven’t figured out how it works in a real classroom with real kids. Unfortunately they were running late and I had to leave.) The children are responsible for giving compliments, asking questions and giving recommendations to the story teller. This supports the author’s story development.

There are many questions I wanted to ask. They talked about the development of language and literacy which I am not particularly worried about with our crew. I want to know if they think that the play becomes more sophisticated too through the story telling. Crisanto and Kai reached a sophisticated level of story telling on their own in their 4 year old year. Our other kids probably will too. I wonder if story workshop helps this more sophisticated play happen earlier.

Like I said, I want to know the Italian opinion of it. My guess is if it was explained to Amelia Gambetti, she might say, “It sounds very American.” Not meaning that it is bad of course, but Americans tend to like to dissect things and examine the parts whereas Italians are more likely to look at it all at once.

I suppose we can’t really know how we feel about story workshop unless we made the commitment to try it out for a significant period of time (not just once). Would we get better results with more structure? What would we be losing in the process? Can we get to good sharing and good feedback without the structure of story workshop? Would story workshop teach us how to do sharing and feedback?

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Also, Balanced Life Yoga on Eubank is adding a one hour childrens yoga class beginning June 2.  The class is every Saturday from 11:30-12:30 and costs $5.  The instructor, Paul Darin,  is bringing his percussion instrument collection for use during the class.  caveat:  I (jen) do attend classes here, may help with the childs yoga class,  but do not receive financial gain.

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This day was very busy with angry birds related stuff and other things that had to be done. Even with all the stuff on the to do list, Lisa still found time to be part of a strong emergent math activity and was able to record all this dialog!

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Do we want to schedule a meeting for next week to reflect on our year and think towards our future growth or do we want to do that online?

I am going to post some questions for you to reflect on. Please post your responses, regardless of whether we decide to meet in person or not. I am posting a set of simple questions for the non-coteachers too. I will post answers to. I think it would be a good idea to visit your own thoughts before reading my thoughts or the thoughts of others.

Coteacher questions:

What is something that you feel we should be really proud of this year? In the past when I ask this sort of question, parents name something that their kids did that they are proud of, like maybe Kai riding his bike without training wheels. I want you to think of an answer that reflects our communal project of doing school together, rather than an accomplishment of one child.

What is something that you feel should be a goal for next year for our school? What do we want to get better at?

How did you grow this year as a coteacher?

How would you like to continue to grow as a coteacher next year? What support could the other adults in your learning community give you in meeting your goal?

For the non-coteacher parents:

What is one way in which you (not your child) grew as a parent this year?

In what way would you like to continue to grow next year? Are there any ways in which our school can support you in this?

Are there any ways in which this school year stands out for you?

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This diary entry is not finished. Contributing field trip mamas, please give feedback if something in your section seems misrepresented or incomplete.

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Danielle caught some great pictures from today. The easy access to the pullets seemed to be a special event for many of the children and many of the mamas, so it became a diary entry