Brookside Students Present Survival Guide to Kindergarten

Playing to a packed house, three Brookside Place School first-graders stole the show at a Board of Education meeting on Monday night.

The children, former members of Ann Marie Francis’s morning kindergarten class, presented one of their service learning projects from the 2008-09 school year: a booklet entitled “We Loved Kindergarten and You Will Too.” The book was written for incoming kindergarteners who might be nervous about their first day of school.

Francis, former character education coordinator for the Cranford School District, has extensive experience with service learning, but last year marked the first time she attempted to introduce service curriculum to so young a class.

“I was… skeptical that five- and six-year-olds were capable of participating in authentic service learning,” said Francis. “I quickly found our first endeavor to be a huge success which set any hesitations to rest.”

That first endeavor was the Soup with a Smile food drive. Not only did the class collect canned goods for local food pantries, but the students and their families also wrote knock-knock jokes and attached them to each can. This led Francis to a surprising revelation.

"You have to let them take ownership,” she said. “When the students have a voice, they can take the project in new directions.”

Yet it was their second project, the nicknamed "Comfort Book," that the three students were there to share. The book was an exercise in empathy.

“It served as a review for the lessons learned each month,"  said Francis. "An opportunity to collaborate within small groups, to enhance reading and writing skills, and to practice artistic expression all while reinforcing compassion."

The students, showing no stage fright and even playing to the crowd, spoke about their roles in the project.

Kaylee described her September studies and the stories she heard. She talked about her favorite story, "The Kissing Hand," which is about a raccoon afraid to go to school.

Karina talked about Star of the Week, a show-and-tell type program where each student brings in a poster and tells the class about herself.

“I loved the Star of the Week because you can show your classmates how special you are,” said Karina as Francis and Brookside Principal Michael Klimko held up the poster she made. “Everyone is special in different ways.”

Dane described learning how to write his name in both upper and lowercase letters. He started in September with his first name.

“By June,” he said with a sigh of relief that sent the crowd into peals of laughter, “the boys and girls can write both [their] first and last names the right way.”

Francis said she received numerous thank-you's from incoming kindergarteners and their families, and even learned something herself.

"Any age is ready for service learning!”