The Children Who Surprised Their Teachers

We expected children to like the music. A program for five-year-olds built on song and movement that failed at that would have failed at everything.

So the enjoyment was never the interesting finding. This was.

“Even my students who usually opt out of more musical/active activities were engaged.”

The same observation, in different rooms

That teacher was not alone. Across classrooms, others reported the same thing, unprompted.

“Kept some of my less-focused kids engaged.”

“I noticed that some of my students who struggle with academics were very focused during MMM and seemed to participate and engage successfully.”

One of them added a sentence I have not been able to improve on.

“This gave all students an opportunity to learn and grow and build confidence as a learner.”

A possible explanation, offered carefully

Here is a reading of why this might happen. It is a hypothesis rather than a finding, and it should be treated as one.

A child who is not yet decoding cannot succeed at a reading task in front of her classmates. There is no version of that activity where she looks capable.

She can succeed at keeping a beat. Music offers a way to participate that does not depend on the skill she is behind on, and it does it publicly, in front of the same children who watch her struggle at other points in the day.

Confidence in a Kindergarten room is not abstract. It is built or lost in front of an audience of peers, several times a day.

What repetition does

One teacher tracked a change across two viewings of the same lesson, which is the most useful observation in the set.

“First time, the song, they seemed attentive but didn't participate; then the second, they felt confident and sang and used hand motions.”

Attentive first. Participating second.

That is what repetition is for, and it is why the same lesson runs twice in a week rather than two different lessons once each. A child who does not yet know the song is watching. A child who knows it is doing. Only the second one is practicing.

For the child who is behind, that gap between watching and doing is the whole thing. The second viewing is where she joins.

One more child I was not expecting

There is a third group teachers kept mentioning, and it caught me off guard.

Señora Ingrid delivers the Spanish Language component, which I had thought of mainly as content. Vocabulary a child picks up alongside everything else. Teachers described it doing something else entirely.

“The teaching of Spanish words gave my kids a way to connect to the children in class that spoke Spanish.”

It gave my kids a way to connect to the children in class that spoke Spanish.

That is not vocabulary acquisition. That is a room where, for ten minutes twice a week, the child who speaks Spanish at home is the one who already knows the answer.

Another teacher recorded it in four words: her Spanish-speaking student loved it.

In a classroom where a multilingual learner spends most of the day working in her second language, a lesson that briefly runs on her first is not a small thing. It is another version of the same pattern — a child getting to be visibly capable in front of the peers who usually watch her struggle.