My Background:
Let me start with a full disclosure… I have created insanely
visually busy environments in the past. Not only have I had the brilliantly
coloured corrugated paper, with the matching themed borders, one year I decided
it would be great to get “hom-ier” and I used patterned wall paper. One
bulletin board even had a quilt of wallpapers samples for the background. They
were however in the same colour grouping- LOL! And that doesn’t begin to cover
what went on top of them and up in every spare square inch of wall space!
Then a number of years ago it did occur to me that if I
wanted a peaceful and calmer class, I needed to begin with a more peaceful
space. I read an article on Feng Shui
for the classroom (just ‘google’ for many sites), and brought in more plants
and some soft furnishings. I snuck in on
the weekend, as I know many of you have, and painted the bulletin boards (not
that we condone that practice, wink, wink) very similar to the peaceful tones
of this blog. That did give me a calmer
feeling, much like the staged homes we see in magazines, done up in harmonious
colours.
I also let go of control of the bulletin boards. I didn’t
have stunning displays set up for the first day of school. I tacked up some commercial
posters that connected with what we would be looking at later that year to
introduce the grade. I allowed the students to create the borders and help put
materials on the walls. I even gave up my addiction and compulsion to make all
titles with those bubble letters! I was more relaxed and felt that it was more
of the students’ classroom.
Besides ‘calming the visual overload, I also took a critical
look at what went up on those walls. My theory was that if the kids or I didn’t
actively use it, it had become akin to the aforementioned wallpaper.
Putting The Theory Into Practice:
The influence of Reggio Emilia philosophies, the thinking
behind Ontario’s move towards a play-based, child-centred Kindergarten and
research on self-regulation has caused a change in our thinking as my partner
and I began to set up our environment this year. Knowing that we were expecting
more than 30 kids (we have ended up with 29), we considered the impact of the
busy visual environment on those who already have difficulty self-regulating
(and their students- ha ha ha!). We decided we wanted a calm neutral background
to build on and stripped down to the corkboard (surprisingly neutral!). We
chose not to put up commercially prepared materials (see article by Patricia
Tarr – below-for a compelling argument about the cute, stereotypical and
trivialized image of childhood these may convey and that children will fit
themselves into) and really build what went on the walls with the kids.
Literally nothing was on the walls for the first week of school- not your
typical K classroom” look by any means!
We are trying to consider how the environment aligns with
our image of the child (see previous blog entry) as a creative, competent,
brilliant little being. How therefore can we reflect the richness of their
individuality, their learning, thinking and work? How can they be co-creators of that
environment? An simple and telling
example of the shift within us is that we do not yet have the alphabet up (end
of second week of school)! Shocking! However, our movement is deliberately away
from the transmission of learning model imparted by a commercial and other-created
alphabet frieze towards co-constructed learning. This coming week we are going
to begin creating our focus letters with materials in the classroom, and
photographing the results. Thus THEY will start to create that alphabet frieze.
So, two weeks in, our walls were no longer bare for Open
House on the 7th day of school.
The bulletin boards contained:
·
Artistic productions from the ‘Creation Station’
·
A “Play Is How Young Children Learn” display of photos
of the children learning through play (labelled with the main area of learning)
surrounding quotes about play from our
Program document and from other sources
·
A display of the role of adults in the room with
photos of us with small captions
·
Examples of the starts of drawing and writing
beside a chart of the stages of writing (introduced and discussed with the
children)
·
A display of students sorting items as part of
our documentation of their math learning
We know that our on-going journey with our walls will be to
expand on our use of how we (with the students) can use them to more deeply document
our thinking and learning. I am sure I
will have more to report in this regard!
Helpful Resources:
· Full Day Early Learning Kindergarten Program, Draft 2010 – p. 35-37
· Consider the Walls by Patricia Tarr
Next blog: Who is doing the learning?
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