Welcome To Mr. Hardwick's Class

Week One 9-25-2005

July 9th, 2006

Apples.
One of the early themes for Mrs. Koenig’s class is apples. Some of the ways Mrs. Koenig has been using apples includes making Johnny Appleseed puppets (after having read and discussed the legend/story) and today we had a taste test of four apple products:

* Apple Juice
* Apple Slices
* Apple Sauce (which the students had made on Tuesday)
* Apple Pie

The students were given little slips of paper with their names on them and were asked to draw a quick smiley picture of themselves. The adults in the room were also a part of the taste test and we were all collectively surveyed and the whole class interactively built a chart/graph with everyone’s choices. I had to hold up the chart (it kept falling down) and the children identified their choices one at a time while Mrs. Koenig glued up the portraits. Mrs. Ferrara (the full-time assistant) baked some fabulous pies which nine of the nineteen students (there are twenty in the class, one was absent) voted for as their favorite. It ended up being a tie between ‘juice’ and ‘pie’ . Once seven or so children had ‘voted’ others started to actively campaign for their choices saying “We’re going to win!” and others who had not even tasted the pie caved in to the pressure and tried to ‘vote’ pie. Mrs. Koenig stopped that and reminded them to vote for themselves and I chirped in with “Is your name ‘Apple Juice’ ?”. The students then read the chart, identifying which were the ‘winners’, how many voted in each category, which had the fewest (apple sauce) and the choice in the middle (apple slices).

Administration.
The apple product tasting activity, I think, nicely captures the educational philosophy and practices of Mrs. Koenig. Everybody gets involved, the lessons are interdisciplinary and there is some food and some fun. Mrs. Koenig is taking advantage of all that her school and district has to offer. For example, there is a full-time assistant, (Mrs. Ferrara) who takes the children to their specials and to lunch, staying with them for lunch and when they go outside afterwards. She also puts together their folders and sorts the breakfast and lunch orders, puts out the materials for the various activities and likely many other administrative tasks that I did not notice or did not come up during the day. There is also a one-on-one aide (Ms. Monica) for a classified student who functions very well on his own (this is his second go ’round in Mrs. Koenig class) freeing up Ms. Monica to help other students in little ways. The one-on-one aide is, of course, IEP driven and she is required to shadow her student. However, another set of eyes, even if she doesn’t say or do anything with the other students, acts as a deterrent to mischievous behavior. So on the days that I am there, there are four adults in the room with twenty children. On the days that I am not, there are three. It makes for a pretty well-supervised and enriching experience for the children.

Errata.

Hackensack is a title one district and has gotten a Reading First grant. There are lots of provisions to spending title one grant money and I know very little about it. However, Mrs. Koenig has to set aside a block of 3 hours each day for Reading First literacy programs and it has become a part of how the days are structured. Her school/class (I am not really sure if it is just her class or the whole school) has also gotten some computer equipment (3 pcs and a printer) with the stipulation that it be used with some interactive software from Pearson called Waterford. She would periodically send groups of three children off to the PCs for fifteen minutes at a clip and let them step through at whatever level they were on. She must have trained them because she did not go over there to set them up or really monitor them in any way. She did say that she gets a detailed report about their progress and what their specific answers to questions were. I glanced at the manuals but it was just that, a glance. One thing that happened that I am not sure about is the use of school PA for extended announcements after the pledge. Apparently, this is a primary means of communication from administration to staff and often takes the place of paper or email backup (like, there isn’t any). There were announcements until about 8:50 and everyone had tuned them out well before they were finished. The school is undergoing a renovation (and will be all year) so Mrs. Koenig’s class is in major disarray (and will be all year).

As an aside, I was the recipient of four spontaneous hugs (from kindergartners), I tied at least fifteen sneakers and two children told me they loved me. I woke up today trying to figure out how to go back and haven’t stopped thinking about the whole Jackson Avenue School experience since I left yesterday afternoon.

It was that special.