Lessons from Kindergarten #1

Things I Learned in Kindergarten...well, actually the title should be "Things I Learned While Working in My Daughter's Kindergarten Class on Friday Afternoons," but honestly, that really doesn't roll off the tongue does it?

Jesus was big on children and believed that they had some special insights about faith. Overlooking the fact that Jesus did not have kids, and thus was spared changing dirty diapers and dealing with a two year old who have just learned the word "no," let assume he was right. I have put my keen intellect to the task and come up with several "insights" about faith that I discovered while working in my daughter's Kindergarten class. Here we go:

#1 - Spelling is a Communal Activity

Kindergarten is not the same anymore. Granted, its been a few years, but I vaguely remember that Kindergarten was basically a prep course for elementary school. We might have worked on our alphabet and numbers. Perhaps we even learned a few colors and shapes. But the real focus was on social skills. And naps. The rage in nap time fashion in the 70s were these little rugs that had been made from strips of cloth. Everybody had one. No one wanted to use it. To this day my back hurts just thinking about laying on that rag-rug on the hard floor. Oh to be young and limber again!

Social skills were important because for most of my classmates this was the first time we were thrown in with a bunch of other kids for an extended period of time. So, in order to avoid a potentially chaotic situation in 1st grade we were shipped off to school to learn how to sit, listen, share, sit, and nap.

Today, kids have more experience with being in settings with other kids. Preschools and daycare have cornered the market on basic social skills (except for tattling, but we have already covered that little jewel in the last blog) so now Kindergarten is all about hardcore learning. There are no rugs, no naps. Nope, today the little tykes are expected to walk into 1st grade knowing how to count to at least 100 (by 1s, 2s, 5s, and 10s) and recognize shapes that I did not learn till 3rd grade. ABC's? Forget about it. They are reading, and not just Dick and Jane kiddies books. I swear I saw a kid in my daughter's class browsing through a copy of "Ulysses"!

With reading comes writing. From day one the teacher had the kids do something called Writer's Workshop. They get a special piece of paper on which they are to write a story and then draw a picture about it. In the fall the kids were able to draw better than write. But as the year wore on they had to write longer and more complicated stories. Writing involves one of my least favorite activities in the world - spelling. The kids come up with some wonderful ideas for stories but they don't always know how to spell the words. So they ask the teacher, or me (big, I mean big mistake). Or they ask someone else at their table. This, to me, is the greatest part of Writer's Workshop, watching 5 and 6 year olds try and figure out how to spell. Sometimes one of the kids at the table knows how to spell the word and slowly tells the other child what letters to write down. If no one knows how to spell the word the whole table brainstorms together and comes up with a solution. They don't always get it right, but that is okay. What they are figuring out is that learning new things can be hard. Better to work together than go it alone.

These kids get the point of faith communities (aka Church). Faith is not easy! There are lots of questions and sometimes we struggle to find the answers on our own. But God has given us this incredible gift of community, a bunch of people sitting at our table who can help us figure out the problem. Do faith communities always get the right answer? No, but that is okay. We keep working together, learning together, serving together, loving together. Along the way we learn that faith is not always about the right answer but rather is about being in community with each other and God. Relationships are the answer. And naps, but not on the hard floor.