working together

We often celebrate working together - how can you be a helpful partner and how can you be a successful partnership? Working together isn't always easy, especially when you work together in a large group. Being part of a large class encourages children to explore and understand a variety of ways of learning, doing, and being. A large class offers children many opportunities to develop patience, empathy, and flexibility.

I value our whole group learning, even when it takes longer or feels challenging. I believe it's important to work through the feeling of discomfort as a community and follow through with tasks or plans. Here are some examples of different kinds of success, because a successful moment is often full of discomfort, mistakes, uncertainty, and growth.

On Monday, work partners shared their writing with one another. The children continue to prepare their writing for publication. Work partners help to make writing stronger by providing feedback. A partner should notice something powerful in your writing, such as detail, and something to work on. A partner may offer their feedback as a comment or a question; Can you tell me more about that? 

As I went around the room and listened, I thought, THIS is success. Children are sharing their work, reading their writing, talking about their writing, and they are excited! I took some photographs and later gathered the children together. I asked how it felt. What I heard from the children was very different than what I observed.

Children told me that some partners made the choice to be silly and not listen. As we always do, we took the time to discuss the problem. It was a mistake and we can learn from it. You should let your partner know that you are disappointed or frustrated. When a child shares this honest feeling with a peer, the message is more valuable than when an adult or teacher checks in.

Was the children's time sharing and working in a writing partnership still successful? I believe so. Part of the experience was learning how to be together - something we will continue to revisit all year long! I hope as these children move on to first grade, they can bring their knowledge about how to work together and their value of togetherness with them.

 

 

 

In the below photographs one partnership puts two literacy puzzles together during Academic Choice. These puzzles support children's understanding and knowledge of rhyming, rhyme production, letter sounds, and beginning sounds in words. During the share we made a plan to put the letters in alphabetical order. When you finish an alphabet puzzle you can create a learning challenge for yourself - put the letters in order!

First, we counted by two's - 52 pieces. Then, despite some interruptions - from children and adults - we persevered. We had made a plan to put the puzzle in alphabetical order as a community. It did mean that we only had a few minutes outside at the end of the day, but it felt important to finish the task - because the idea to do it all together came from one of the children and everyone had agreed.

 

 


The Morning Message continues to be the greatest opportunity to work together and solve problems as a community of engaged learners! When filling in missing numbers, the children follow along, thinking about the next number in the sequence to fill in. In the below photograph, we talked about patterns and how the pattern starts over or continues after 100. Our whole group learning during morning meeting is rich and supportive of all children.