When the rains started this year I remember waking up one morning and thinking: “I am retired now. Rainy days don’t mean facing all that child energy contained in a building.”
But then I had a different memory of times when rainy days were amazing, even magical.
When I worked in the Open Classroom the yard opened at ten o’clock, and remained that way until clean-up at 11:30. Children filtered in and out of the classrooms, the art room, and the center of the pod, for activities and their classroom assignments. When it rained hard we all stayed inside.
One rainy day we all had already been inside for two or three days. The energy in the building had been amping up for days. My colleague Larry Nigro, who had a first/second grade class, told us he would be running an art store. He and our art room teacher Kristy Arroyo were busy pulling out supplies.
For the next hour or so his students (with the aid of the co-oping parents and Kristy) set up the art supplies on a table, priced their merchandise, got fake money and cash registers going, and created a store.
It was amazing to watch. Second graders came over and invited a kinder or a first grader to come to their store. Children were given money and their buddy helped them choose what they wished to buy. Children helped each other at the cash register. You could actually feel and breathe the focus and energy in the room, no– in the building. Older children came and invited the younger children to visit the store. Children were in mixed age groups everywhere.
Spontaneous art projects were happening. Children were so engaged they had forgotten it was raining. At one point I remember looking at some boys who usually were outside the minute the yard opened and thinking: “They don’t even know it stopped raining.”
A short while later someone noticed the break in the rain. There was a mad dash for shovels and much of that energy moved outside.
When I look back on it I see how lucky we all were. We were a community of both adults and children that enjoyed being together, helping each other grow and learn while having a good time. For me the beauty of the Open Classroom was the ability of the adults to create a rich ever-changing learning environment, in which children were allowed to be who they are and continue to grow and thrive.