Bunnies and the Best Laid Plans

I need a friend with bunnies. We're starting a bunny unit study (and I use the term loosely.. mostly what my kids do is play) and I'd love to have a real bunny for them to hold. But I can't bring one into the cafeteria. No animals allowed.

One of the things I do at work is make an activity plan for the week. We have a form for it, and we're to fill in the blanks.

This coming week, our activities are all about rabbits. How they live, what they eat, what they do. We'll talk about angora rabbits and yarn and weaving and self-sustaining farming, make bunnies from model magic, make pop-up bunnies with little paper cups, cotton balls and easter grass. We'll talk about the giant bunnies from Scotland, the little ones we find out in the fields during Spring, read some stories about rabbits and hopefully the kids will know a little more about rabbits when we're done.

When we go to the gym, we'll play some music and do the bunny hop. We'll play Duck, Duck, Rabbit. I'm sure you can figure out how that will work. 

There are five blanks for each day and five days in a week, which makes 25 spaces to fill in. I decorate the lesson plans with little pictures, put a lot of pretty colors on them and make them look nice. I don't have to do that, it's considered good enough to write on them with black ink and post them. Preferably without spelling or grammatical errors.

I choose what we're going to study, although if a child has ideas and/or expresses an interest in something, I make sure to foster that.

The company offers a prepackaged curriculum with lessons and instructional time built in, but there isn't enough hands-on. The kids are tired of being instructed all day long, too.

What they fail to take into account is how much time we do NOT have in an afternoon. Sticking to an activity plan is a physical impossibility. Unless one has a time machine. Which this one does not. :)

The kids arrive at 3. They trickle in until 3:15. If they're all there, I make that call to the office, "All the weasels are here, we're clear." They hold the school buses until all my kids are accounted for. If I don't have all my kids, we have to figure out why. We don't want a small child going home to an empty house. The safety of my kids is my first priority. We have one boy who just can't seem to remember which days he's supposed to go to the pick up area, which days he's supposed to be with me or which days he's supposed to ride the school bus. If I had a nickel for each minute I've spent trying to track that kid down I'd have like 85 dollars and five cents. Ha.

For the first 20 minutes or so, the kids are tossing their backpacks into the laundry baskets we provide for their things, deciding what to do for their first activity (magnet building, art table, Legos) and catching up with each other after a busy day in school. It's chaotic, but it's controlled chaos. If the noise is above a certain level, we remind them to bring their voices down to here (visual demo with my hand raised high into the air, then lowered) and that teachers are still working in the building. They are good kids. They just have a really hard time acting like little adults. :)

Lyssa signs them into the attendance binder, I sign them in on another form, if our computer is working (and it's made by HP, draw your own conclusion) I put them in the computer, too. After they're all signed in and they've calmed down a little, we head over to the other hallway to wash our hands.

I would give Eric's left nut for a sink right there in the cafeteria, it would solve a myriad of issues. So hand washing takes at least 10 minutes. More if anyone has to pee, as that person has to wait until the other kids are out of the bathroom to do it.

During our program time, a child must be in the bathroom alone for privacy reasons. It's a licensing thing, although I'd probably do it for the protection of children anyway.

So the kids are still eating their snacks until nearly 4 PM. We really can't do it any earlier than we already do. Then we do some sort of physical activity. We go to the gym or outside. After playtime, it's time to read. We get back into the cafeteria, select books to read and sit down for 20 minutes.

During reading time, parents start picking kids up. At 4:30,we're finished reading.

So for an hour and a half, we really haven't had time for anything but basic business... check in, wash up, eat a snack and read. One of the selling points for our programs is that kids read/do homework.

So we do activities after we've done the mandatory things. But there isn't much time for a big activity. I'm sure you can see why.

I've been told that our programs are supposed to go to a cookie cutter format next year, that we're all going to do the same lessons at the same time.

I think that's pretty optimistic of them.
No, I don't.
I think it's unrealistic.
I also don't think the top-down instructional model is healthy or effective for children. And after they've been lectured and made to sit still to 'learn' all day, it's not fair to subject them to still more of it.

When I applied for the job, I interviewed the manager more than she interviewed me, I think. After 10 years of homeschooling, I was not interested in being the homework police. I am good at helping kids enjoy discovery, not so good at being the learning enforcer. I told her that I see my role as a facilitator of learning. A person who helps children discover, then stands back and lets them feel like they're the first kid to ever find something out. Kids are smart. They don't need to have bits of learning bolted on. They don't need to be smacked over the head with it. They don't need to regurgitate it on a test, either.

She assured me that activities for the children are a choice. That if a child wants to come to our programs for the Legos and nothing else, we accommodate that. After careful consideration (would you be surprised to learn I really, really pondered before taking the job?) I accepted the position. I felt mostly okay about it.

When I worked with Sunshine, I admired her skills with the kids. The children had so many choices and were so happy to be there. I have been running my program the same way for seven years. It works well. The kids are happy, the parents are happy, and my program earns money for the company. Yay. We all win.

I'm sure you're not surprised to learn that making the kids happy is my favorite part of the above. Obviously taking care of them and making sure they're safe is what I do, but taking care of the whole child is important.

I've said before that I see a large part of my function as blunting the effects of institutional education.
For some children, school is incredibly damaging.
I don't want to add to it.

We do have one site director who's quite happy to rule over the children.
I won't call her a power-tripping asshole here.

But the idea of making my program look like the programs of the educratic type? Not going to happen.

I'm not one of 'them'. :)