Feeling Like the New Kid

The new semester brought with it a new experience for me at Jumpstart. Unfortunately, due to schedule changes I was unable to keep my team or classroom. I started over with new people at a new school, but the biggest change was the children. Instead of working with 4-turning-5 year olds, I was now working with 3-turning-4 year olds. The difference was HUGE. Their level of maturity, how they interact with each other, attention spans, letter recognition—everything seemed different. I felt like I needed to learn and implement new strategies in the classroom in order to adjust.

More than anything, I felt like the new kid. The children weren’t familiar with me, and I didn’t have a place in their classroom yet. For the first couple sessions, they were hesitant in engaging with me and coming to my center. (Incidentally, I also had books, which is one of the less glamorous center time activities.) I had to prove myself—so when they did come around I went over the top. I was loud and silly as I read in weird voices, built suspense and laughed as at the stories.

I wanted to build relationships with these children. I loved my old team and classroom, and the thing I missed most was the sense of comfort and confidence I had with the kids. I loved the fact that I knew all their names, their weird tendencies, which centers they liked, who they could and could not cooperate with—this knowledge felt empowering, it made me feel like I was doing my job right. Needless to say, I was eager to reacquire this confidence in my new classroom. For the most part, by session plan four I felt I had it down. This classroom, in comparison with the 26 girls in my original one, was small. On a good day we had around 12 kids in session.

But there was still one boy I had yet to connect with. He wasn’t in my reading group, didn’t sit near me during circle time, and never came to my center. I was determined to fix this during session plan five. I was the puzzles and manipulatives center—the activity was uppercase alphabet matching boards. Puzzles wasn’t the most popular center time activity, but it had potential, so I sat patiently at the table.

The boy had just been removed from Dramatic Play and was nowhere near pleased when the team leader led him to Puzzles, but I dove right in. I presented him with the first board, “Are you ready? This one is really really tricky, but I bet you can solve all four boards.” He nodded and I started cheering him on. By the time he got to the fourth board I was chanting his name. “The crowd’s going wiiiiiiiild!” I whisper shouted. He was laughing, but so intent on finishing and so proud of himself when he did. “Can I go again?” he asked at the end. I think I smiled even bigger than he did. 

~ Laurel Cratsley
Corps member
Team Learning