It’s been great to be back at school this week. Your children seem to have grown an incredible amount since we last saw each other. Really though, growth has been ongoing throughout the school year, and the recent break only made that more obvious to see.
One day this week, teachers took a moment to simply look around the room in awe: a group of 3 working side-by-side on individual ideas at the art table; several children engaged in fantasy play in our castle, even navigating turn-taking with the new drawbridge; a few kids collaborating on a block building project; a small group with the assisting parent at the water table; and a couple kids chatting while exploring sensory bins filled with cornmeal. They were all successfully pursuing their own ideas and communicating effectively with each other. There’s always a moment like this around this time of year when the growth is just so obvious, when the work and patience children have invested all year long is almost tangible. You can feel a shift from earlier in the year and it is so, so sweet.
Because children are now more aware of our routines, expectations, and systems for turn taking, we can step back and let them do a lot of work on their own. They make the sign up lists for activities, and they often monitor the turns. They negotiate who is going to have a chance to wear the one knight helmet we have in our castle dressups, and they’ve mostly managed to navigate taking turns with our drawbridge, even though it’s a brand new contraption with somewhat complicated mechanics.
This is not to say that things are harmonious all the time. Along with these expanded skill sets, we sometimes see bigger emotional expressions. As children have settled in at school and their relationships with each other have deepened, their expectations of themselves and of each other have also grown. The difference now is that they have some more skills they can access in difficult moments. It may not always happen, but the possibility is there, and each experience builds on the ones before it. Growing and growing and growing…
