The view from the halfway mark of my first year teaching senior kindergarten is a lot different than it was just four months ago. Whereas I struggled every day in terms of how to implement the curriculum, now I am so much more comfortable in many, but not all, areas of the program. I hadn’t really taken the time to reflect on how I was feeling about my progress as a teacher and co-learner until, while chatting with my principal the other day, she asked me if I loved kindergarten. I hesitated, because I was thinking back to other grades I have taught, wondering if I had ever said that I loved teaching any of them. I realized, in forming my answer to her, that it is never really the curriculum of any given grade that I love teaching, but rather learning about my learners in order to be able to teach them is what I enjoy the most. I said to her that last term felt like ice-climbing, but now I am on a sort of a plateau – I can take a breath, look back proudly at where I came from, and look forward to how much I still need to learn. I most definitely have not mastered this grade, however, with the loop-de-loop learning curve I have been on this year, I am sure I will be a much better teacher next year.

That is what I was telling myself until recently when our school board confirmed its decision to integrate junior kindergarten with senior kindergarten next year. Even after having lived the senior kindergarten life for six months and feeling they could not be too dissimilar, I could not really tell you what goes on in a junior kindergarten classroom. That is why I am hoping that my principal will give me some coverage time to hang out in one of our JK classrooms to get a feel for the way the program is run and to see how the wee ones go through their day, as a way to help me imagine a blended classroom. Adding French Immersion will be another part of the picture – what will that look like? In-service workshops are to be part of the plan from the school board, and hopefully, so too is having quality time to work it all through with a supportive team of ECEs and teachers. Whereas this year, I was scrambling to make sense of it all as the newbie in the midst of a crew of seasoned kindergarten teachers and ECEs, next year, everyone will be trying to work things through. Life is indeed for learning curves.

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