Kindergartners can be the Best Teachers!

In December I decided I wanted to try out something new with my kinders. I had learned about Seesaw, an online portfolio for students, last year but hadn’t found an easy way to introduce it to my students so it fell into the background for me. I had the idea this year that I could use this as another way to collect data on my students and thought I would start out with using it to show reading progress having students record their reading of about four sentences packed with high frequency words and CVC words. I called upon our wonderful instructional technology support teacher to come and help me walk my students through this process. She came once and then we decided to have her come again and supervise the kids trying it on their own and helping when needed. Through this process one thing she noticed was that a few of my students mastered this very quickly and a few even were trying to help each other. This sparked the idea creating a new class job for my job chart “technician” a student who the kids would ask before me if they were having technology problems, the kids loved the idea and with that we went into winter break.

Fast forward two weeks and I am welcoming my students back on January 2nd using my morning message to introduce their new weekly reading job on Seesaw and ready to get them started. We set up procedure so the kids knew who’s turn it was and who they could ask for help instead of me since I would be busy working with students! I was super excited and sent the first child off to get started, pulled a reading group and out of the corner of my eye watched as what I thought was a perfect system ran smoothly for the next hour. At recess I excitedly pulled up my teacher account ready to see five students reading and saw nothing. Turns out after two weeks off for winter break nobody fully remembered what to do. I went home that night and after thinking a lot about it I decided tomorrow was a new day and we would start over using a new strategy inspired by our new class job. The next morning I pulled the kids to the carpet and showed them on the smartboard each of the steps they needed to follow. Then I took the first student over and walked them through the process step by step,

but when they were done this time I had them stay and told them they got to be the teacher! When the next student came over, instead of me walking them through the process I had my previous student do it, we repeated the process this way having each student who had just completed the process teach the next. We always say the best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else. I have been more than impressed watching my tiny five and six year olds demonstrate this the past few weeks. Most of them are now better at the process than I am!