The Last Word
By Anna Shiroma, Early Childhood Curricular & Instructional Specialist When I came to Langley in August, I knew I was joining a special community. And as I’ve become a part of the Langley family over the past seven months, this joyful community’s commitment to learning and education has become abundantly clear. In my role as early childhood curricular and instructional specialist, I am in the unique position to support and engage with our Primary School students, teachers, and families. I observe classrooms daily, take part in frequent coaching meetings with teachers, and have amazing opportunities to interact with students, whether pretending to be a community worker with preschoolers, playing math games with junior kindergartners, or writing books with kindergartners.
As we educate Langley’s youngest students, our Primary School teachers also recognize the key role they play in building a strong foundation for a child’s entire school experience. And as we build this early foundation, we place an emphasis on the importance of alignment – within grade levels, divisions, and the entire school (see our feature article about inquiry on page 2). When we align our strategies and language throughout the Primary School, the student experience is consistently joyful and rigorous, supporting academic and social benchmarks. Our foundation is stronger when all the pieces are connected.
I get to celebrate the great work happening in our classTo that end, the Primary School is using a set of aligned rooms, while also collaborating with the faculty to build a and standardized benchmarks this year from preschool to common language to capture the research-based strategies kindergarten to ensure each part of our program builds on they use each day. When we talk about purposeful play or itself. Our learning targets, the objective for each lesson, emergent literacy as a Primary School team, this common align to these grade-level benchmarks. In junior kindergarlanguage ensures we are ten, for example, teachers all supporting each child support the learning target When we align our strategies and language consistently in each part of for producing rhymes by throughout the Primary School, the student their day. My unique perplaying a rhyming game spective of each classroom experience is consistently joyful and rigorous, during their literacy block. and each student allows In kindergarten math, stusupporting academic and social benchmarks. me to identify the different dents are making different needs across classrooms and sets of objects to meet plan for and support our students throughout their Primary the learning targets of adding one more or one less. And School years and as they transition to Lower School. when our preschoolers and junior kindergartners focus on aligned literacy and math skills, we know they are prepared During after-school bi-monthly professional developand ready for kindergarten. Research shows that learning ment sessions for our Primary School faculty this year, targets that are aligned to benchmarks lead to higher I am helping facilitate discussions that allow us to dive student growth. into key areas, like purposeful play, and plan strategies to support student growth and learning. As we define what Langley’s Primary School is truly a wonderful place to be. purposeful play means at Langley and share the strategies Both students and teachers love learning and growing. we use in the classroom, our faculty is building a common They care deeply about each other, and the collaboration understanding about how to best support students during across classrooms is unlike any I have seen. Community at play. We discuss the research around developmentally Langley isn’t just a word. It lives throughout the work of appropriate materials, social-emotional learning, and ways students and teachers every day. And it’s exciting for me to scaffold learning for students. We are teachers and to be a part of this vibrant learning community as we work learners, elevating, defining, and sharing effective practices together to make it even stronger. occurring every day in our Primary School classrooms.
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