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    In the Company of Children
    In the Company of Children
    In the Company of Children
    Ebook200 pages1 hour

    In the Company of Children

    By Dante Lara and Horace Puglisi

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    About this ebook

    Good teachers do much more than instructing children. They develop a relationship built on trust, honesty, humor, and above all love. When two or more students discuss varied ways to solve problems we have the beginnings of a creative dialogue, which is the root of inventiveness and a direct path to successful collaboration skills. Too often we do not recognize the value of friendships that is buoyed up by the brotherhood or sisterhood
    among children. There is a force that flows between them, an invisible understanding cementing their friendship
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateMay 7, 2013
    ISBN9781481745444
    In the Company of Children
    Author

    Dante Lara

    Horace Puglisi was awarded The Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching in 1995. In 1997 Puglisi was recognized as a Christa McAuliffe Fellow by the United States Department of Education. In the summer of 2000 Puglisi was accepted as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and studied environmental science at Princeton University. Finally in 2005 Puglisi was the recipient of the Vermont National Education Association Award for Teaching Excellence. Puglisi retired from teaching in 2008 from Founders Elementary School and the Founders Staff presented him with an Innovative Ideas Award for his creativity, individuality, and contributions to education over the last 46 years.

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      Book preview

      In the Company of Children - Dante Lara

      © 2013 by Horace Puglisi. All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

      Published by AuthorHouse   05/02/2013

      ISBN: 978-1-4817-4546-8 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4817-4545-1 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4817-4544-4 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2013907756

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Table of Contents

      Part I   The Early Beginnings

      Chapter 1    Tuning in to the Right Channel—What I Learned from Other Educators

      Part II    My Beliefs about Teaching

      Chapter 2    Friendship—Love Is Most Important

      Chapter 3    Challenging Oneself

      Chapter 4    Teamwork

      Chapter 5    Total Focus

      Chapter 6    Walking in Another’s Footsteps

      Chapter 7    Celebrations

      Chapter 8    Enjoying the Moment

      Chapter 9    Sharing One’s Knowledge

      Chapter 10  Satisfaction Guaranteed

      Chapter 11  Reaching the Outer Limits

      Part III   The Big-Picture Themes

      Chapter 12  Lessons of the Rain Forest

      Chapter 13  Sons and Daughters of the Galileo Society

      Chapter 14  World’s Great Explorers

      Chapter 15  The Columbus Voyage

      Chapter 16  Serving Others—Adding Quality to Our Lives

      Chapter 17  Peopling of America

      Chapter 18  Iqbal

      Part IV   Special Events

      Chapter 19  Creative Ingenuity and Marshmallow Accelerators

      Chapter 20  Morning Meetings and Poems by Jack Prolanski

      Chapter 21  Halloween Madness

      Part V   Curriculum Connections

      Chapter 22  The Habits of Mind

      Chapter 23  Mathematics for All Students

      Chapter 24  Literacy

      Chapter 25  The Magic of Science

      Part VI   Closing Comments

      Chapter 26  The Classroom as an Oasis

      Chapter 27  Cloudy and Rain Days

      Chapter 28  A Model for Teaching, Instructing, and Educating

      Chapter 29  Some Thoughts, Advice, and Guidance

      Part VII    Appendices

      Appendix A  Partial List of Sons and Daughters of the Galileo Society Scientists

      Appendix B  Advanced Word Problems

      Appendix C  List of the World’s Great Explorers

      Appendix D  Theme Books

      Appendix E  Generic Reading Contract

      Appendix F  Esperanza Rising Reading Contract

      Appendix G  Habits of Mind

      Appendix H  The Peopling of America

      Appendix I   Vocabulary Words

      Appendix J  Greek and Latin for Ten-Year-Olds

      Appendix K  Fiddling-Around Stories

      Appendix L  The Life-World

      Appendix M  Silly Putty and Other Polymers

      Appendix N  Founders Woods

      Appendix O  Books That Have Impacted My Teaching

      Dedication

      On Friday, December 14, 2012, twenty young children and six staff members were brutally murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The lives of these children, ages six and seven, were cut short. They will never experience the joys and love so abundant in our schools, nor will they experience all of the challenges and rewards found in our schools. This book, In the Company of Children, is dedicated to their memory. I offer you a glimpse of my teaching experiences in an elementary school classroom as a way to celebrate the good our schools offer our children.

      —Horace Puglisi, Ph.D.

      Introduction

      In the Company of Children is an invitation to read about my beliefs about teaching and learning. By including dozens of classroom photos, I share the varied ways I used to encourage children to become investigators; help them discover their innate abilities; guide them to set meaningful goals; show them the value of accuracy, attention to detail, and diligence; provide ways for them to develop deep-seated friendships; and establish genuine family relationships in the classroom.

      For me, the most effective kind of teaching takes its cue from the understanding that children are natural active learners. They are able to construct new knowledge from real experiences and store these new experiences into their already existing mental frameworks. Each student has his or her own idiosyncratic mannerisms, needs, and learning style. In the classroom, students are constantly making decisions, becoming participants in their own education. Each is part of a community of learners, coming to understand ideas from the inside out with one another’s help. They all still acquire important facts and skills, but in the context of a big picture and for a purpose they understand. Often, their questions drive the curriculum for the day or the whole week. They discover that learning to think like scientists, writers, and historians matters most.

      Throughout this narrative you will read personal statements written by my students. I incorporate these testimonials because they represent the passion these children have for learning and the satisfaction it brings them, and they show my students’ reactions to my beliefs put into practice.

      This book is divided into six sections. The first, Early Beginnings, takes you back to my earliest teaching experiences and illustrates the very first significant eureka moment I had regarding teaching. Part II includes some of my basic beliefs about teaching—I write about friendship, teamwork, and total focus. Part III is about the big-picture themes and corresponding units. I describe the Sons and Daughters of the Galileo Society and the World’s Great Explorers units. Part IV focuses on some of our special events, such as Halloween Madness and Marshmallow Accelerators. Part V illustrates how I incorporated the school curriculum—literacy, mathematics, and science. Part VI includes my final comments about teaching and learning.

      —Horace Puglisi, PhD

      He is Mr. Possible,

      the one who helped us get even more creative.

      A bear that teaches his cubs to become wise with wisdom.

      He is the GPS of our lives, that which tells us to take the right steps to live in peace.

      He is the fire that won’t go out when teaching.

      —Alex Souvannaseng

      Acknowledgements

      Teaching is not and should not be a solitary profession. Educators need to reach out to colleagues so they can join forces and work in partnerships. Six individuals—Debbie Richardson, Paul Garrett, Kathy Grace, Judy Kaplan, Ellie Morency, and Colleen Armstrong—were my teammates during my final years teaching in Vermont. Together we were able to fashion and invent unique learning opportunities for the children.

      Acknowledgement%201.JPG

      Above is a photo of Judy Kaplan (media center director) dressed as Queen Isabella during a Columbus voyage reenactment. Judy and I planned the school’s first Invention Convention program; we, along with other media personnel, traveled to Boston and were invited for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Children’s Museum. Later, we designed and added various physical learning structures in the media centers. These structures were modeled after those observed in Boston.

      When the Montreal Botanical Society learned about my plans for including the University of Vermont’s (UVM) botanical observatories in a new integrated botany unit—Lessons of the Rain Forest—they shipped a huge collection of semitropical plants. Judy found space in her media center, where we displayed dozens of these plants using the many National Gardening Association GrowLabs I had purchased with funds from my National Science Foundation (NSF) Science Teaching Award. Later, she provided a large space where I created an indoor vivarium full of tropical plants, sheltered by polyurethane walls and featuring paintings done by Liz Sidi. Years later when I was asked to add reading to my instruction, Judy introduced me to the huge Dorothy Canfield Fisher (DCF) collection, and we both assembled a reading list incorporation the themes I had planned to include in my reading program (please see Appendix D).

      In the photo below, Colleen Armstrong, UVM greenhouse director, helps one of my students locate and observe seed development during one of our UVM field study labs. Colleen planned the students’ experiments and arranged for us to use two houses of the huge greenhouse for our Lessons of the Rain Forest unit. Ellie Morency, art teacher, accompanied our two classes and instructed students on drawing the various semitropical plants

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