Collaboration

Collaborative Work

By

Darcie Pike-Wilkie

I was recently reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague of mine last year. I had mentioned wanting to establish a relationship with the grade one teachers, in effort to help ease the transition from kindergarten to grade one. With my recent move to Alberton Elementary School this year, now would seem like the perfect time to get to know the grade one teachers personally and professionally. Although this write-up will only refer to one meeting that occurred between Mrs. HeatherJeffery and myself, it is my hope that there will be many more discussions and sharing of ideas.

Initially, we began talking about guided reading. Our school is just beginning a new guided reading program in which all the students in the school will be doing guided reading at the same time each day, and that there will be multi-grade groupings, dependent upon reading levels. Last week we had received an e-mail from the school board giving us benchmarks with time frames for our students. Heather relayed to me that although we are encouraged as educators to go deep and broad within the book levels, there is pressure to get to a certain level by a certain date. Sometimes the two goals contradict themselves, creating anxiety and strain. I certainly understood what Heather was saying, as I too am expected to have my student s at a certain level by a certain date.

We then shared our thoughts about phonological awareness, which brought us to a discussion on Jolly Phonics. Heather said she could see a difference when she began using the program with the children. They could make connections with the actions and the sounds. She found the greatest improvements with the short vowel sounds using the jolly phonics program. We felt that by me introducing the sounds with the jingles in kindergarten, a solid foundation would be laid and would flow nicely into the grade one program. Our discussion then went on to blending sounds, particularly blending three sounds at the beginning of the year. Presently, her students are struggling with this, although they can identify the sounds in isolation. This is something I can definitely pay close attention to in kindergarten and provide support and practice. Something I want to introduce in kindergarten for the first time this year is Elkonin boxes. I am hopeful that this will help the students in segmenting and blending sounds of words.

One other area we had a discussion on was the children’s self-help skills. Perhaps we need to make parents more aware at Welcome to Kindergarten in the Spring that the children need to work on self-help skills before kindergarten begins in the fall and that the parents can encourage this at home. We need to make parents aware that self-help skills are actually part of the kindergarten and grade one curriculum and are included on the progress reports.

As I was meeting with Heather, two other educators entered her room asking to borrow different items. I was thinking to myself that Heather must be a great resource if three of us were asking her for different things all within that half hour. I look forward to building a relationship with her and thereby ease the transition of kindergarten students to grade one.

As I was leaving the room, I was very encouraged to see Heather beginning to use learning centers with her students for the first time.  The kindergarten children in my class are already familiar with work stations and small groups. Perhaps this is an area that I can offer support to the grade one teachers as we have been doing centers for many years in kindergarten.