Friday, March 27, 2015

Field Blog 4: Hathaway Brown, Day 2

At the end of my second day at Hathaway Brown, a couple of occurrences stuck out to me. To set the scene, the students wrote “I Am” poems in the morning to be displayed at their Art Show on Monday, March 9. I remember writing this exact poem when I was in seventh or eighth grade, so it was crazy to see four and five year olds doing the same activity I did at an older age. Time passed by, and the students, along with Mrs. Pietrafese, were sitting in a circle on the floor on the pond rug. Mrs. Pietrafese read out loud the poems created by the students in her class, and she wanted the other students to guess who the author of the poem was; she instructed the author of the poem to remain quiet if it was his or hers being read aloud. At such a young age, it was profound to see how the students knew each others thoughts.
Considering the room was a mess, Mrs. Pietrafese then made it a game to clean up the room; she instructed her students to pick up ten things and put them back in their proper place. Within moments, the room was tidied up. Some students picked up more than ten things, and if Mrs. Pietrafese saw this, she praised that student for going above and beyond the task at hand. As soon as Mrs. Pietrafese made cleaning up the room a game, the students seemed to take more interest in it. Perhaps just simply cleaning the room without a challenge was boring for the students or less interesting.

Finally, before lunch, Mrs. Pietrafese and her helper took the students to the Big Muscle Room to kill some time. The Big Muscle Room is an indoor playground with brightly painted walls and a padded floor. I remember seeing a beautiful dragonfly painted on the one wall, and I would assume that the floor is padded because if the children fall, then it will not hurt as badly. Generally speaking, the girls played with the girls, and the boys played with the boys. There was a set of twins in Mrs. Pietrafese’s class, a boy and a girl, and during the time in the Big Muscle Room, the two of them played with each other. As I was sitting there, I was wondering why none of the boys were playing with the girls and vice versa. I guess it is a natural instinct to play/interact with people of the same gender as you, or in the case of the twins, to play with your sibling. All in all, though, Day 2 at Hathaway Brown was a success as well.

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