The current read-aloud book in Kourtenay Sherwood’s first-grade classroom is called “Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business,” about a little girl who comes to believe that her newborn brother is actually a monkey, and while none of Mrs. Sherwood’s students look like monkeys (not really), each child in her menagerie of 6- and 7-year-olds occupies a different branch in the developmental Kapok tree.
“At this age, in one classroom, you can have kids who are reading chapter books,” explained Sherwood, speaking from her brightly lit room at Jefferson Elementary, “while other kids are just starting to sound out the letters in each word and trying to put the sounds together. The range is huge.”
The challenge for Sherwood, then, when guiding kids at this raw age, is to provide, in the course of a single lesson, instruction that challenges her precocious students without leaving behind those kids whose talents are less advanced.
IT’S FOR this reason, among others, that a capacity for novel thinking — for imagination — is perhaps the greatest gift a teacher of very young kids can possess. How do you steal from the vast world of knowledge those few facts that will form the basis of a young person’s future learning? And what is the very best method for getting those cardinal ideas to adhere to the 6-year-old brain, whose largest chunks of gray matter are occupied with thoughts of recess and toys and slime and animals and new bicycles? How do you, in a year’s time, make a reader out of someone who barely knows his alphabet? Or get a first-grader to find some small foothold in the boundless magesteria of mathematics when he doesn’t even know that two and two is four?
Enter Sherwood: “With math, for instance, when you just put numbers in front of them — when you say three plus two — that’s a little bit hard. It’s too abstract. Being able to use manipulatives helps, things that are more hands-on” — Sherwood retrieves five small, Lego-style bricks from a plastic tub and divides them into one group of three and another of two — “where the kids can see what happens when you combine the two groups to make five.”
She has another lesson for teaching pattern recognition that involves the use of Skittles, and since loving candy is one of the few things you don’t have to teach kids, that lesson tends to win out over others.
“It’s just about finding what works best for each student,” said Sherwood.
WHILE behavioral issues intrude on any teacher’s school day, the advantage of overseeing a group this young is that the infractions are rarely severe. Rampant tattling is probably Sherwood’s biggest problem at the moment. Her pupils are at the age when the only thing more delightful than being rewarded for your own good behavior is the opportunity to relish the public comeuppance of the kid next to you. “I definitely hear more tattling throughout the day than anything else, but it also gives us a chance to talk about it as a class. Every experience at this age is a learning experience.”
SHERWOOD is in her first year of teaching. She received her degree in elementary education from Fort Hays State University in December. But she’s no stranger to this region. The 32-year-old grew up in Piqua and graduated from high school in Yates Center. It was at YCHS that she met her husband, Jase. But theirs wasn’t a tale of high school romance. The two connected years later over MySpace, and eventually wed. Jase’s job took the family — the Sherwoods have two boys, 9 and 2 — to Ellsworth for a period of years, and it was from here that Sherwood completed her online studies through FHSU and fulfilled her first year of student teaching at USD 327.
The Sherwoods recently returned to southeast Kansas and now make their home in Gas.
Sherwood feels like she’s come home in another respect, too. After years spent in a variety of different jobs — and as a student, and as a devoted parent of young boys — she has at last arrived at something like her life’s work.
“I love it here, I love what I do,” said Sherwood. “When I’m with the students, it doesn’t even feel like I’m working, because I enjoy it so much. The day goes by so fast, which tells me that, yes — this is where I need to be.”
