Meaningful Assessment-ready Experiences for PreK Students (MAE) in the Community

Our curriculum, MAE for Pre K, uses hands-on, real life and contextual contributions to everyday life.  The most real life context children have is their neighborhood and communities.  Children move in and around communities all the time but parents can encourage explicit and specific contemplation about their communities:  who’s in a community?  Where is my community? Which streets and structures are in my community?  Wait…what IS community?? Community, simply, is where you are and who surrounds you.  

At Oak Tree, we use MAE for Pre K to explore not just the whos of our community, but also the whats.  The whats include the natural things that children see.  Children see things and remember them, especially the extraordinary things.  When my family and I first moved to California, we lived in a neighborhood with a ginormous square tree.  My son always pointed it out to friends and relatives who visited-as if they could miss seeing it.  Now, when we talk about where we used to live, we use the tree as a memory point of sorts:  ‘Remember when we used to live by that giant square tree...’ The implication here being that we don’t live there now and that we have a new community with new memory points and landmarks.

We also talk about buildings, streets, street names, stores and even the guy who sells fruit on the same corner.  These are all elements of our community that children can use as points of discussion and exploration.  If you join us for our center’s Community Day, you will see very different things, depending on the center because each center connects to its own community.  Our partners will set up tables and share resources found in particular neighborhoods.  Our students will draw maps and construct pictures of their particular surroundings. Our teachers will connect to parents in different ways to showcase the skills and learning for their particular classes.  

At our school, we understand that children see more than the nurses, firemen, policemen and the other community helpers that preschools love to highlight.  They have questions about everyone, and we try to answer simply, honestly and frankly.  Often, sometimes adults don’t know what to say about some of the people who live where we do.  We shy away from ‘seeing’ some people in our communities, but whether or not we like it, children see everything. And, they’re filters often don’t turn off questions that make grown ups uncomfortable.  Do we ignore them?  Or do we humanize all of those who walk the streets of where we live by simply calling them what they are: people who also live in our community.  I encourage parents to always answer children honestly and directly because as much as we would like to change facts, kids will ask.  They overhear adult things like news and adult to adult conversations.  Because children don’t have the emotional capacity of adults, they get even more worried when we avoid answering them.  They get more afraid when we are afraid.  To foster joy and happiness in children, we can answer with descriptions that are simple and emotion free.  

The diversity of our classrooms mirrors the diversity of our neighborhoods. What surrounds us is a mosaic of different ideas, cultures, places and services.  Oak Tree is an inclusive place that acknowledges our whole community in a way that equalizes everyone’s contribution in making where we live different than anywhere else.  We invite our community in for sharing and fellowship so that our children have as many people helping them grow as possible.  Fear and anxiety can breed in not knowing, so we encourage families to go out and explore where they live.  Get to know the people in your neighborhood who are friendly and welcoming.  We’d love it if the lady at the grocery store knows that you love a certain cereal!  It would be nice if your children learn the names of kinds neighbors nearby.  Connections like these replace fear and anxiety with opportunities for friendship.  We can all agree that kind and familiar connections make where we live a much better community for parents and for children.