Dear TK Rainbow Builders: A letter to my class on our last day of school

Jun 11

Dear TK Rainbow Builders,

You might not know this, but I am a morning person. I wake up really early in the morning to meditate, or exercise, or on a good day, I do both. When our class was on Zoom for the first 8 months of the year, I also had time to sit and think about you and our day before we started school - I had more than an hour of extra time because I didn’t have the same long drive to our school. I’d open my computer, go into our virtual google classroom, and get our Morning Meeting slides ready.

It was in those early mornings that I would think about how I could make our online learning fun every day. You know how I’d make numbers in our calendar disappear, or there would be mistakes or missing words in the morning message? Well, that wasn’t the “White Board Ghost” like I told you - it was me. Those silly things made you laugh, and I loved hearing you laugh - even on Zoom, when I could really only hear one of you at a time. When you laughed, it made me feel better - better about having to teach you through the little gridlines on my laptop, better about having to ask you to repeat things 17 times if your internet connection was unstable or glitchy, better about teaching your 2-dimensional selves in a 3-dimensional world.

But on April 12, that all changed.

With nine weeks left in the year, I got to greet you in the morning, in-person at our campus, in our school building. Suddenly, you were full human beings (you always were), not talking heads, and so was I. We’d always been more than we saw on Zoom, but now we had the proof.

The little moments I always took for granted as a teacher became moments of utter, indescribable beauty. Reading a story, having you call out “I have this book!” Sitting beside you, watching you paint. Hanging the painting up immediately after it dried, making our classroom space your own. You, shooting a basketball, racing each other on a track, singing. So much singing. Even with our muffled masks, the singing was music to my ears. You, talking over each other, interrupting one another, excited to share news. To my surprise, I loved these interruptions, because no one could ever interrupt or talk over each other on Zoom. These days, I often just sit listening to you talk, and laugh, and sing, thinking to myself: you are all so three-dimensional.

I have taught children for 16 years. And somehow, after just a few days back in person, I saw you all as more whole, more real, more complex than any group of children I’ve ever taught. Is that because for so many months I could only see you on Zoom’s Gallery view?

My mission in these last 9 weeks of school has been to do anything, everything that wasn’t possible online. All the games, the activities, the songs. Working in partnerships, in groups - I realized - it doesn’t matter if we are 3 feet apart. We are together and that’s what matters.

So for our last project, I thought we’d plant and take care of a garden.

If we were still in online school, we could have done a planting project and it would have been great. Just like all the projects you did this year - our website, our podcast, our poetry book - all of our projects this year have been amazing, despite the distance.

We probably would had planted individual seeds at home, and watched them grow on our window sills or kitchen counters, kept individual journals and and observations, and we could have even made our garden YouTube video where we taught others about gardening (like the one we just finished) and it would have been a great project, but it wouldn’t have been a garden.

A garden needed to be all of us, together. We got to dig in the dirt next to our friends, and share shovels, and take turns investigating with a magnifying glass, and admire the paintings of plants everyone did, hanging in our outdoor classroom. We talked so easily and shared all of our ideas and observations. Remember when Julie said that plants need water just like people do? And Derrian pointed out that every seed is different, and grows into a different plant, just like each of us is different. Remember when we read in a book that some seeds grow really quickly, and some, like acorns for oak trees, take years and years to grow, and Xavi told us that a seed is a “baby plant” that starts as an “embryo” and Alice mentioned that maybe the grown-up plants take care of the babies and give them water and food and even talk to them to help them grow, and she thought her baby wildflower plant was a girl?

“We learned about poems,” Alice said, “And now we’re learning about plants.” Yes, I responded. “We’re scientists.”

“Actually, aren’t we being botanists?” Xavi asked.

This is our project. We are growing our garden, caring for our plants, caring for one another.

And you know what’s funny - we are in T.K. and that stands for Transitional Kindergarten. You know how sometimes, you can see words you know in other, longer, bigger, words? Look at the word “kindergarten.” It looks a LOT like “garden.” That’s because “kindergarten” is a word that means “children’s garden.” I can just hear one of you chiming in “Yeah! But one letter is different! The T!”

I looked it up, and the word kindergarten came from the German language. The first kindergarten was started almost 300 years ago in Germany. So anyway, our class is a “children’s garden.” Doesn’t that seem fitting?

Because we are a children’s garden.

We aren’t just growing seeds. We’re growing children! You are like the seeds we planted - each of you unique, special, different, growing. Just like our seeds that grew into wildflowers, or our beans in our egg cartons that we transferred to our garden bed, covered, as Sidney said, under a “cozy blanket” of soil.

And so, as this year ends, I wanted to tell you: You are all growing - like the plants and flowers we grew together. You are all beautiful, 3-dimensional, whole, amazing humans. I will never forget this year, I’ll never forget you. I’m so glad we had these 9 weeks together in-person, to be together, sing, play, love and grow together - our beautiful children’s garden.

Have a great summer with your family and friends. I hope you’ll stop by and visit me next year.

Love,

Sara