Chilling Lessons - from Kids

Interactive Museum Exhibit. Like our classes: organised chaos

Things were going pretty well this morning. Ok - who am I kidding. The kids weren't settling down, they were running around, chattering, banging on the keys on the classroom piano. One boy in particular, let's call him Miko, was refusing to join the group when the other kids finally were starting to quiet down and the control freak in me was going slightly nuts. 

Miko ran to the bookshelf and started pulling on magazines and ... a rag.

Were we regressing? I wondered. Things seemed so much more peaceful when we had the 9-12 year olds only and we had our "one conversation at a time" rule. It had taken a long while, but we'd gotten to the point in which we didn't even need to raise our voices to get the kids' attention - just raise our hand to indicate we were about to talk.

Now we've got everyone from 6 up, proportionally fewer volunteers, and for a few long minutes, it felt like bedlam.



We were now five weeks into a new program with a real curriculum, books, and lesson plans and an Allied Educator here to help us volunteers to get on our own feet - for which I'm extremely grateful on all counts. But the drunken disorderlimess was just a bit - disconcerting. And Miko looked like he was on a sugar high.
G, our Allied Educator, looks totally unfazed. "Today," she says. "We're going to introductions. We're going to pick two people, look into their eyes, shake hands, introduce ourselves."

She asks the adults - the volunteers/ "teachers" - to come to the front of the room and takes Miko by the hand. "Miko," she says, "You're going to to introduce our new teacher - can you do that?"

Miko keeps perfectly quiet, sways a bit, and looks towards the ceiling. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

"OK," says G, "I'm going to pretend to be you and do the introduction."

She stoops behind him and imitating an 8-year-old's voice the best she can to much laughter, introduces a new volunteer called Jack, and Miko laughs. Miko is back in the building. He doesn't fully participate yet, but he's at least with us. The other kids volunteer to introduce the rest of us and do pretty well. All's calm again.

Lesson One: incorporate reluctant kids into the class by making them part of the class.

Later, when the kids are doing groupwork, a 7-year-old Chilli Padi in Pink in my group has what seems to me like a tantrum of seismic proportions. She was an ultra-shy kid a few weeks ago when I first met her and now whe wants to do everything herself? The group is meant to reconstruct a poem they've been learning: puting strips of paper, each with one line of the poem, in order. They then had to stick them onto a larger piece of paper - in a group.

"This one's MINE!," she grabs the paper, the glue, the cut up lines from the other girls. I ask her to take turns and she starts sulking, folds her arms, runs off and makes like a pink airplane. Then she crash lands back into the group for a second or two at a time and flies off again and no amount of cajoling seems to work. I'm seriously annoyed by now so I turn my attention to the other three girls in the group.

Later, at break, I tell my friend H, another volunteer, and she says, "Chillll...they're kids...that's what kids do.

Neither of us have kids by the way. But it did remind me of contentious conference calls and meetings. You'd think that years of working woulda made kids less of a challenge but...no.

Lesson Two: Chill. Kids are ... kids.


It's now reading time, each kid selects a book of their reading level. Chilli Padi in Pink ends up with me and I'm like...seriously? But - one-on-one, she's really attentive, engaged, interested and an extremely fast learner. She proactively writes in the worksheet words she has difficulty with and to my surprise, includes the word "the" - which she has no problems reading, but we'd been working on the soft "th". She really really wants to learn.

She reads well, adapts her pronunciation and I'm floored. She's funny and precocious and I'm having a really great time. I can't reconcile this girl with the shy one of two weeks ago, the tantrumy one of this morning, and the amazingly keen and entertaining reader.

Lesson Three: Leave assumptions at door. Take the time to get to know the child.

Funny "take the time to know the child" is what I tell every new volunteer - so, how daft of me not to folow my own rule. With 15 kids and 5 or 6 volunteers it's easy to feel the adrenalin more than the calm.

But - I'm learning.