Conferences, Celeen Away, Puppet Show

Dear Nursery Families,

Please know that Celeen will be away from our Butterfly Classroom from this Wednesday and all of next week. In addition to her many other gifts and occupations, Celeen organizes and guides retreats for women on Whidbey Island and round the world, and from time to time she will be away from our classroom as she is involved in this other important work. Please ask Celeen if you want more information about this work; I do not want to misrepresent or oversimplify.

Anne Mauk (who worked as a kindergarten assistant at our school last year) will be the usual substitute for Celeen. On the upcoming Wednesdays, however, we will have a replacement for Anne (two possibilities are decided for whom the role is just at the moment).

We will have no school on November 23, 24, and 25. Teachers have an in-service day on that Monday, and we offer conferences for parents on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Because I have some availability earlier and childcare challenges on the mornings of the 24th and 25th, I am offering some additional, early conference times on the next two Thursday mornings--and on the Wednesday early evening, November 18 (when we were to have our parent meeting, which is rescheduled so that we can all see Helle Heckmann speak). I will also offer conference times during the afternoons on the 24th and 25th.

While grades families are expected to attend a fall and spring parent & teacher conference, early childhood families are asked to come to one conference in either the fall or the spring. The kindergarten teachers and I have a goal of providing more frequent--if briefer--communication about every child in the class rather than a long quasi-report at conference time. This is to say that even if you choose to refrain from signing up for a fall conference, I will strive to provide vignettes from your child's morning in the nursery class in a written form.

Our children seem to enjoy the new puppet show of granddaughter's efforts to bring a pumpkin home for Thanksgiving with the help of grandmother, grandfather, the dog, cat, and mouse. They also have asked for me to reprise Rub-a-Dub (and several children performed that earlier puppet show themselves today). Children are finding new playmates (with occasional tension and conflicts because another child feels left out) and new parts of the room to play in (that is, rather than the same two or three children heading for the loft right away, different children go to the loft, while others realize building and imaginative possibilities elsewhere in the room. While a number of children seemed less willing to allow peace to settle upon them during teacher-led or quiet activities today (perhaps because of Halloween or the time change or both), as a group the children are on a trend of working well together.

The healthy social life is found
When, in the mirror of each human soul,
The entire community finds its reflection,
And when, in the community,
The virtue of each one is living.

Rudolf Steiner—The Social Motto

Elsewhere Steiner wrote that a social group can be at its healthiest and most effective when the work of the individual serves the needs of the group and when the needs of the individual are served by the work of the group (I do not have the exact quote). While I do not lecture about Rudolf Steiner in my nursery classes (at least not until after Thanksgiving [that's a joke]), I have impressed by how our nursery children have been living and working and serving into this social ethic. While our children show the normal and healthy survival instincts to make sure they get the toy or food or friend they want, they have been willing to be flexible. When baking bread this year, for example, we combine our rolls together into loaves. While children still often want to make their "own" loaf (even though we will all share it the next day), a number of children were quite willing to let go of ownership of this or that portion of bread, ready to share the work and results with others. Because children tend to want to eat the dough before it gets to the oven, I have been encouraging them to use their strength to serve the group as we prepare bread for the next day (the dough is sometimes tasty enough that I have to exhort some children to share their strength). A number of children feel inspired by this, and we have fewer and fewer power struggles about tasting bread. This social ethic seems much more "just right" than power struggles about sanitation, etiquette, and the like. Children want to be strong. They want to help. They want to serve (true, they also want to be served). They want to experience autonomy, initiative, and industry. Our children in this year's Butterfly nursery seem to be on a path of doing this well.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde