The Best Laid Plans

"Kids don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are." -Jim Henson

"Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching kids what counts is best." -Bob Talbert

Everything and anything can be a teachable moment.

As part of our curriculum we have to administer the SOLO assessment (which is an oral vocabulary assessment). I feel like most of what I've done this year is assess, assess, assess. Not sure when they expect me to teach the kids what I'm assessing, but that's a topic for another day.

This year, remembering where my students were weakest last year, I made sure to utilize certain words beyond where they came up in stories or themes. For example, "calendar" was a word my students struggled with last year. This year they did not! I was much more conscious, whenever we wrote the date in the daily message, to have students say, and point to, the calendar, and I said it more as well. Similarly, every day when we went to recess, or returned from recess, I made a point to use the word "gate" in a sentence. "Leo, will you open the gate for me?" "Kayla, can you make sure to close the gate?" "You don't need to touch the gate when you go through" etc. etc. And yet, the word "gate" was the weakest word of the assessment.

So my students may not pick up the vocabulary I'm trying so hard to teach them, but the words that do stick, are often not the ones you'd expect.

Case in point: the occupational therapist leant me a "Me Moves" dvd. There is calming music and various shots of different ages and cultures of people demonstrate the "moves" for students to follow. It involves moving your arms not to fast in various shapes--up and down, in circles, squares, alternating, and then the harder ones where your hands do different things.

It is very very difficult for my students to do anything quietly, and this calming, no-noise-necessary activity is no exception. Whenever the person on the screen would change, someone (and then everyone) felt it necessary to comment, as if we all don't have working eyes. They would shout "grandma!" "baby!" etc. When a person who looked Asian came on the screen, my students decided to shout "China". After failing to shush them, I paused the video, and told them that China is a country, and cannot be used to describe a person. China is a place, Chinese people live in China.

Initially, this shut them up, and we had a bit of productivity. However, now my students, when an Asian is the model on "me moves" they will say "no China, China is a country." No one even needs to try to say "China", they just jump ahead to "China is a country".

I can't get them to learn the word "gate" after saying it, gesturing to it, describing it, and using it a million times, but I say "China is a country" once, and they have that vocab down. Go figure.