About the Series, Our Students Have Class: Our families want to know what’s new in local schools. So we’ve created this feature series. We visit classrooms to ask educators what they are teaching and ask students to reflect on what they’re learning.
After living in a cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts for two years, Thoreau famously observed, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
The same could be said for the kindergartners who enter Heidi Forrest’s classroom at Edwards Elementary School every day. Just like Thoreau wandered through the woods in search of knowledge, Forrest’s mini adventurers discover essential facts in their new surroundings.
“I like that she teaches us a lot of things: how to read, how to sound letters out, how to rhyme,” said kindergartner Beckham Burnside.
Yet how do local teachers like Forrest inspire students to absorb the most basic information, the numbers and letters upon which all future lessons will be built?
“You have to start at the basics of everything and integrate a lot of art and creativity,” Forrest said.
For example, she uses both art and creativity in math, leveraging paint-by-number kits to help students identify numbers in some kits or solve addition problems in others. In other words, if purple is #7, then any purple section will include a problem such as 6+1 or 5+2.
An example of how Forrest makes reading instruction a creative and engaging experience for her little students is by encouraging students to identify the sounds that make up each word. She laughs together with her students as they dream up different words that contain the same sounds, such as cat and rat.
By engaging the students in these activities, she shares the essential facts, our ABCs and 123s, guiding her kindergartners through her Forrest of learning. They’ve only just started their walk in the woods, but, so far, these students have been enjoying their first few months as K-12 kids.
“I like being at Edwards,” Beckham said. “It teaches us a lot of things.”
His classmate, Francesca “Frankie” Aguilar Landry, felt the same way.
“I feel like this school is pretty cool,” Frankie said.