Volunteering Mondays

5/17/10

I've been volunteering in Bennett's kindergarten classroom the past few months, and it has been so fun to see B and his little school family in action.  I'm utterly impressed with Miss Moorehead and how she handles all twenty bundles of energy in one tiny portable, not to mention how she handles their very varied abilities. 

I help with what she calls Writers' Workshop--hello, can you see why I'm loving this?--where the kids brainstorm a topic collectively, then talk about what they're going to write in partners, and then do the actual writing by themselves.  It's fantastic to watch them go through this process of turning facts into opinions/ideas and then turning those ideas into words, sentences, or even a story. 

Every time I volunteer, however, I'm floored by how disparate their levels of educational development are.  A handful of kids already write at what I would classify as a second-grade level.  Another handful of kids barely know their letters and struggle to remember which letter makes which sound.  Then you have the twelve kids inbetween, whose writing skills are probably more mainstream kindergarten, but still differ enough to need some one-on-one attention, which brings me to my point: how do these teachers do it on their own?