My daily schedule is one the most asked questions I get from my fellow kindergarten teachers. Many wonder how I how I get it all in. The short answer is: I don't usually. Time with my students is not the issue (5-year-olds in a classroom for 5 hours daily is PLENTY for them, however, if they could manage successfully without the big behavior issues we are more commonly facing each year, extended time COULD be a positive thing... but that's a whole other blog post!). More flexibility with our time is key.
As teachers, we are faced with mandatory minutes per subject per day and/or week in all subjects. This is where we have to get creative by using cross-curricular concepts (the CCC's) to try to even attempt to meet the demands that are placed on us for the classroom time we do spend with our students. Unfortunately, one of the subjects that gets pushed to the side in elementary school is science.
Back in my early days, we had a 20:1 ratio in kindergarten. We also shared a classroom with another teacher, with some overlap time. And on early-release Tuesdays, both AM and PM classes would attend at the same time (40 kids/2 teachers in one room for 4 hours...ack!). This was when my kindergarten team had to get creative to manage all of those kids AND get to those subjects that we found difficult to cover (2 birds/1 stone). We decided to do rotations: science, P.E., art, and social studies (currently morphed into social skills...also another blog post!). Four teachers, four subjects. P.E. would be outside and art would be in a shared pod.
Each year, our rotation schedule changes according to number of teachers or other factors, but four is ideal for us. We have also done many configurations of groups over the years. Since we all teach in our own classrooms, extra space is not necessary any more. I have been in charge of science instruction for our kindergarten classes for most of the years we have implemented rotations.
This is our current rotation schedule, now on Thursdays:
7:30 - School Begins
8:15-9:00 - Rotation #1
9:45-10:30 - Rotation #2
11:30-12:15 - Rotation #3
12:15-1:00 - Rotation #4
1:10 - Dismissal
If you would like to learn more about how you can manage this type of program, please reach out!
Happy and Positive SCIENCE Teaching!
Erin Grebel
Photo Captions: Building a bridge for the Gingerbread Man (top right); Building hideouts for the Gingerbread Man (1st left, 2nd right); Making an object change direction without touching it (bottom left); Exploring strong and weak pushes (bottom right); Exploring motion with starting and stopping an object in motion (video).
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