"There is intentionality behind all of our activities." 


How do students learn to learn?


For a few hundred students at GIPS, it starts with Pre-School.

Amber O'Hara, Howard Elementary, and Beki Piel, Starr Elementary, are two of the Pre-School Teachers at GIPS.  Both educators join the GIPS Cast to share about the fun taking place in their classrooms but, more importantly, how they empower 4 year old students to be ready for Kindergarten. 

What you’ll hear in the conversation is a window into the science of teaching that goes into helping a child learn how to learn.  From spelling their name, to cutting with scissors, to recognizing shapes, to breaking down syllables, and so much more.

Because in order to be successful [and have fun] in school, students need to know how to learn.

 

#WeAreGIPS 

 

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

 

Mitchell Roush  00:10

Welcome back to "The GIPS Cast" — a conversation-based podcast exploring the voices of Grand Island Public Schools in Nebraska. I'm your host, Mitchell Roush, Communications Director here at GIPS. And as always, I am excited to bring to you stories from all corners of our district, because here we're driven by our mission of every student, every day, a success. We're glad you're here. How do students learn to learn? For a few 100 students at GIPS. It starts with preschool. Now, when I say the word preschool, you probably have a basic idea of what that looks like. Maybe you picture a classroom with small chairs, lots of vibrant colors, a big rug in the middle of the room for circle time, perhaps a play area, and definitely some cubbies with crafts and art supplies, and, of course, the sound of laughing children. And you know what? All of that is true. But as regular listeners of this podcast know, there's so much more thought and intentionality and science that goes into a preschool classroom. So recently, I had the chance to visit two of our preschool classrooms and hang out with a couple of our fabulous early childhood education teachers, one at Howard Elementary and one at Star Elementary. And oh my goodness, in addition to all of the fun taking place in these classrooms, I learned so much about the science of learning and all that it takes to help a four year old student be prepared to enter kindergarten. So what you'll hear in the following conversation is a window into the science of teaching that goes into helping a child learn how to learn, from spelling their name to cutting with scissors to recognizing shapes to breaking down syllables and words and so so much more. Give a listen.

 

Amber O'Hara  02:20

I'm Amber O'Hara and I teach preschool at Howard Elementary School.

 

Beki  Piel  02:26

I'm Beki Piel. I'm a preschool teacher at Starr elementary thank

 

Mitchell Roush  02:30

you both so much for being here. I'm really excited to talk about preschool. Preschool. So fun. All right, so Becky, we're gonna start with you. Okay, you know we were kind of talking about this a couple of days ago as we were preparing for this podcast, and one thing that you both had mentioned was the concept of students need to learn how to learn. And I thought that was such a really good sound bite, and that feels kind of like a good thesis statement for how you approach preschool. So what does that mean for you in your classroom? When you say students need to learn how to learn.

 

Beki  Piel  03:01

Think about all the things we take for granted about learning. You have to focus your attention, you have to listen, you have to be in control of your body, all of those things we have to teach students how to do that before we can dig into curriculum. We spend so much time role playing and practicing this for months and months, almost the whole year, constantly just reminding them how to be in control of their bodies so they can focus their attention to do any kind of learning.

 

Mitchell Roush  03:26

That's huge, right? If, because you're getting littles, like, how old are your kids when they're coming? Yeah, anywhere from three to five years old. Three to five years old. So again, this is their first experience to school, and a lot of them don't know what that's like, right? So how do you help your students feel confident in the classroom?

 

Beki  Piel  03:43

Routine and consistency is clue is a key here, especially at the beginning of the year, we plan with our teams, where every single person is throughout the day, students, teachers, parents, what should the paras be doing? What should the teacher be doing? What should the students be doing? We have it written out list by list. What we're saying is consistent in the same thing over and over again. We're practicing it is planned out for the whole day. We're not just winging it.

 

Mitchell Roush  04:09

And why does consistency matter?

 

Beki  Piel  04:11

Consistency matters because kids who know what to expect can be more regulated and can have that control of themselves.

 

Mitchell Roush  04:18

That's huge. That is huge, especially, again, learning a new environment, but also getting comfortable in school, because while this is their first exposure to school, they will be in school for a while. And so you're setting some foundational things here exactly Amber. I want to come to you really quick. I didn't realize this until we were talking the other day, but you started off in the kindergarten classroom, and then you have intentionally moved to preschool, which is an interesting thing to do. So you've been doing preschool for four years, no two years, two two years, preschool for two years. So talk to me about what, what fueled you to go and make the change to preschool, and what is, what is different? Why is this important to you?

 

Amber O'Hara  04:59

Kidergarten has changed drastically, just on the fact that academics are being more enforced. And I loved in the preschool classroom, where you get to work on social and emotional skills with children and getting them and prepping them up for that next coming kindergarten school year, we have lots of behavior pieces for kids that are not focused on when you're working so close with academics in the kindergarten classroom that I wanted to go down to the preschool part and just kind of focus more on behaviors and making kids feel more comfortable in a classroom.

 

Mitchell Roush  05:34

That's huge, and I don't know, maybe sometimes that's easy to take for granted that comfort piece in a classroom, but that's a really big deal. Why is that important?

 

Amber O'Hara  05:45

When students come into the classroom, they know what to expect daily and how to prepare for it. And if you come to preschool, you have a whole year of going through those routines and getting children ready to learn and not focusing on what do I do with this? Where do I go with this? They kind of know that, and they just go with it. When they get into the classroom.

 

Mitchell Roush  06:07

Safe, predictable environments, we literally hear that at every level in in the school district, for a reason, walk through a couple of examples for me, and that concept again, learning how to learn, right? So you have curriculum things that you want them to know about, but you also have to help them get introduced to school. So when you like, break down different things through the day. What does that look like?

 

Amber O'Hara  06:29

When a first time preschooler enters the environment? Many things are unknown, the simple basics of, where do I hang my backpack? How do I unzip my coat? We take so many things for granted that we feel students should know and just know them, but in reality, they don't right. In preschool, we try to break all of what seem to be simple skills into a step by step process so each student can be successful when learning them things like holding a pencil with a three point grit or just sitting quietly and listening to a story on the rug, how to make friends, how to play well with others, to opening and closing a simple glue stick and how it works, even just the way of holding a pair of scissors to make them cut. These are things that are focused on daily, along with many other social and emotional skills that help early learners feel successful every day at school. What about this shape?

 

Mitchell Roush  07:51

As adults, sometimes you forget that, like you have to learn how to do these things, and I'm just thinking about like something as simple as not only sitting down on the floor and listening to a story, but doing that with a group of other children, right? Like, I think about my kids, my kids know how to sit on the floor and listen to a story, but they're probably doing that just in a one on one thing. What's that like to do with 15 other kids in a classroom? Or how do you hold a pencil correctly? That's That's kind of a biggie.

 

Amber O'Hara  08:19

And all of it takes time and a step by step process on a daily basis that you go over routinely, more than one time a day.

 

Mitchell Roush  08:28

So Beki, I want to come to you for a second. I know I've heard this, and I'm sure that you both have heard this far more than I have that concept of or a misunderstanding sometimes that preschool is just playing with kids. That is not the case. We know that that's not the case. Now is your chance to unpack that. Talk to me that about the difference Becky between just playing and play based learning, because those are two different things.

 

Beki  Piel  08:55

Yeah, absolutely. For kids this age play is learning. This is their way of learning. At preschool, we're not just dumping a toy box out on the floor and letting them go hog wild, right, right? We are setting up intentional activities through play that teach them the skills they need. For example, right now we're in a restaurant theme, and one of the objectives that our kids tend to struggle with is matching numerals with quantities. So this week I struggle with that too. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, this week I had a pizza crust and I had some just little red chips, and we were playing the restaurant, and you were the chef, and the chef is in charge of getting the orders right. Here's an order for a pepperoni pizza that requires six pepperonis. What number do you see your hair? That's a six. Put six pepperonis on the pizza. Don't send it to the customer until it's right. So through that play, you have now introduced the numeral. They can identify the numeral. They've counted one to one. Putting pepperonis on the pizza, they can send it on their way to the customer. Get a new order and do it again, and it's fun. They love. To do it. They love to take turns being in charge of who's the chef and putting the chef hat on. And it's that's how we are able to teach them much easier than drill and kill with flash cards or wrote counting over and over again. We're playing to teach those skills.

 

Mitchell Roush  10:15

They're engaged like they are fully engaged in that with through through the creative experience, absolutely and also doing that with other people at the same time. Like, that's collaboration with their peers, which is huge, but it's kind of mind blowing to think about while simply playing pizza shop would be a fun game anyway, but you're that numeral piece the I again, that's another thing that I think would be really easy for me to overlook. If I'm watching that in your classroom, and you're like, Oh, look. They're playing so nicely together. But they're also learning these core things about why you need to put this many pepperonis on there, what it's supposed to look like, and how you do that.

 

Beki  Piel  10:48

All of that vocabulary. This isn't just a pizza shop. This is a pizzeria. My chef's hat is called a toke. We learned lots of things just throughout that play this week, throughout these themes. Rather than just throwing toys out there saying, go ahead and go play. There's intentionality behind all of our toys and activities.

 

Mitchell Roush  11:03

I love that intentionality behind all of that you've been you've been in the preschool classroom for a while, so you get a front row seat to this How? How does that help the kids grow and learn like you're seeing that every day.

 

Beki  Piel  11:15

There are so many skills like Amber shared those social skills. How do I play with a friend? How do I communicate with a friend when we're thinking about higher grades, we are really focused on students collaborating in higher grades, and so in preschool, we have to start that, and we do it through play.

 

Mitchell Roush  11:35

So Amber, I want to come back to you. We talked about this before I started hitting record, so I'm not just springing this on you, but I want to play for you a video. So you were generous enough to let me come and visit your classroom. The other day, what I got to see was you were similar to the pizzeria game that Becky's talking about you were doing construction paper pizzas with your students, but again, talking about that intentionality, it was more than just we made a pretty pizza out of construction paper. So if you're cool with it, I'd like to play for you this video. And could you just talk me through? What are you doing? How are you engaging the kids? What's your methodology? And just walk our listeners through like this was more than just a fun activity that they built something in 10 minutes.

 

Amber O'Hara  12:18

The first part of it, I'm talking to the students about the sounds that a rectangle starts with, showing them that visual phonics, so it helps them make it purposeful to what the shape is. They're also digging through their bags to find a specific color or crayon. Some of the kids were pulling out things. They weren't real sure, but they would look at me, so I pulled out my blue crayon as kind of a sample piece for them to look at, not necessarily giving them the answer, but making them use their other skills to figure out which one was their correct color. It also had I also had them look and see if they could match that shape to the actual shape on their paper, so that I knew they really, truly did and could identify what that shape was.

 

Mitchell Roush  13:12

That's huge. And I I learned a lot watching that right, like, because I could tell, even though I'm not a teacher, like with the way you were asking your questions, and the way you were holding the shape up in front of your students, like you wanted them to understand the shape they were recognizing before they moved on to pasting it on their activity. So you have the motor skill piece of like pasting and making the thing, but even before that, you're engaging their cognitive understanding of something.

 

Amber O'Hara  13:39

Yeah! And the great thing about that is is there were so many other shapes built into that piece. So it was also kind of an assessment part for me, knowing which kids knew what particular shapes, and maybe which ones as a whole group that we needed to focus on later in that lesson and go back to and meet with the ones that were kind of not so easy for them to recognize.

 

Mitchell Roush  14:00

That's a good point. You're also kind of taking a barometer of, like, what are the ones they're getting? What are the ones we need to spend more time with so that they do get it? Shapes are kind of important too. Like, again, easy to take for granted, but like, we need to know our shapes to found to like, foundationally function.

 

Amber O'Hara  14:16

Yeah, that's one thing as being a former kindergarten teacher, is I took so many things for granted when kids started kindergarten thinking, yeah, shapes are easy, colors are easy, numbers are easy. Kids should know these when they come in and they don't. And so focusing on those things and making sure that kids have a great base and a background before they are going to kindergarten prepares them so much more and for that kindergarten teacher,

 

Mitchell Roush  14:43

Beki, you too were very generous. And let me hang out in your classroom earlier this week, which was great. And I saw something that was really fun to me, which was how you were engaging your students in sentence structure, all right. And so I would love to play. This video for you and hear about the methodology behind why are you engaging the students in the way that you are and what are you trying to get them to learn? Because clearly this is a very intentional thing.

 

Beki  Piel  15:11

Yes. So our students are practicing with our Hegarty curriculum, which focuses on phonics skills. And what I'm doing here is reading them a sentence. I'm asking them to tap out each word in the sentence, and then we count out how many words are in each of the sentences. This helps with their reading and writing skills, even if they're not writing and reading right now, because first of all, I can hear the difference between each word versus the syllables of each word. I'm also counting each of the words so I know how many words there are. I'm connecting numbers to that, and then it works later on for our writing. We practice writing each day, play planning in the classroom by writing lines, a line for each word, and by counting the words that I hear in a sentence, it helps me connect how many lines I need to write when I'm writing my sentences later.

 

Mitchell Roush  15:57

What is the methodology behind doing that particular activity as a group too. How does that help the students?

 

Beki  Piel  16:03

Some of our students don't understand how to do it, especially our English language students. You know, obviously I'm teaching in English all the time and giving them the opportunity to hear others around them saying it. Give them the opportunity to try saying it without being focused upon they're all getting the practice, and even if they're not saying the words or understanding, they're hearing the cadence, and they're able to tap out each word, and it will help them with their writing eventually.

 

Mitchell Roush  16:28

That is so cool!  Like, again, that the layers there, there, it's, it's an engaging activity. Yes, they're learning some base level things, yes, but there's so much more going on there, and that seems to be the common theme of our preschool classrooms. There's so much more going on, and there's a reason for that.

 

Amber O'Hara  16:46

And the great thing is doing the same thing in all of our preschool programs around Gi, PS, yeah.

 

Mitchell Roush  16:54

So unpack that. We how many, how many preschool classrooms do we have? And we're all doing the same thing, right? Like, so we've got O-L-C, the early childhood learning center. We've got Howard, we've got Starr, we've got Lincoln.

 

Amber O'Hara  17:06

We have 12 classrooms, I believe. And yeah, the kids are all on the same page across the district, learning the same books. They are learning the same styles of writing and how to become a writer like Becky shared, and the steps and pieces that go along with what we're doing are things that I have taught in the kindergarten classroom. So I know that these kids are building a great base for what is upcoming for them in the next years at GIPS.

 

Beki  Piel  17:37

One thing I've gotten every single year as a teacher is feedback from kindergarten teachers across the district, they can spot a child who has been through the early childhood Childhood program from a million miles away, because their kids come in familiar with just how to act in a school building. I would rather send a kid to kindergarten that is in control of their body, knows how to attend over any other curriculum, skill, knowing, numbers, counting and things like that. I would rather send a student that is able to pay attention and do the whole job than someone who can say the whole alphabet but cannot listen and follow directions, right? And anybody who's taught kindergarten that sees a kid come from our preschool program, they know them and they can spot them a million miles away.

 

Mitchell Roush  18:17

Absolutely, there's a lot of head nodding going on right now. Absolutely, so I love that word, and that's important for people to understand. So Amber kind of taking that just one step further, are students that finish through the early childhood learning program when they step into a kindergarten classroom. What are what are they equipped with?

 

Beki  Piel  18:36

I have noticed like Beki stated, you can tell on that very first day as a kindergarten teacher, if a student has been exposed not only to a GI PS preschool, but any other preschool, and you know the way that they come in, they act. They know what to do. They know what tools are. They know how to use things. They know the rules in a school setting. And that takes so much time out of an academic teacher's time that yes, not necessarily, is always there. And you're you're focusing on building vocabulary, working with numbers, doing all of the things, and you don't have time to necessarily focus on things that you're expecting students to already know how to do when they come into the classroom, as far as sitting, how to line up, how to wash your hands. And we do. We spend so much time doing those pieces in the preschool program.

 

Mitchell Roush  19:37

Learning, how to learn. And that is so, valuable, so Becky. Why do you love your job? Why do you keep coming back and teaching preschool?

 

Beki  Piel  19:45

I've been doing this. This is my seventh year just in preschool. But I love my job because of the mass amounts of progress we see every single year. Yeah, I tell my my staff this all the time. It may seem like a dumpster fire. Right now, but think about may at any given time, on any day, you might come in my classroom and you might see someone tugging on my leg and crying, someone's peeing their pants three steps away, someone's screaming over there in the corner. And I think I have to keep my my emotions in check in order for this to work too. And so all of this is going on all the time that may comes around. I have a fully functioning class of students that I feel confident to send them to kindergarten. They know the rules in and out. They're a good friend. They can share all of those things that are going to be so important in elementary school. And we did that in a half day program for 180 days. We did that, and that's why I love my job.

 

Mitchell Roush  20:43

Students are a sponge, and especially at this young, young age. And I've and we've had conversations on this podcast before, with our literacy experts in the district as well too, talking about how, like, the the positive impact the early childhood education makes, even just from the literacy perspective, is massive. And so yeah, like you're saying, from the beginning of the year to May, I would imagine the amount of growth and change and adoption that you've seen is huge. Yes, remember, I want to ask you the same question, why do you why do you love teaching preschool?

 

Amber O'Hara  21:12

I just love the excitement on their faces when they come in the door. They are always so pumped to learn anything new, even if it's just the simplest thing. They make it fun and they make it meaningful. And like Becky stated, also, the growth that comes from the beginning of August to the end of May is so phenomenal to watch and see your students go through, but at the end of the day, you know that you made it happen for them and that they are going to be so successful in their next coming school year, that's a good word.

 

Mitchell Roush  21:45

Kind of wrap things up. I ask everybody that guests on this podcast the same question, because I'm fascinated by the answers, and it's wonderful to hear the passion that our people have for what they do. So Amber, since you've got the mic right now, I want to ask you, what is one thing about public education you want people to know about?

 

Amber O'Hara  22:04

I just want everybody out in Grand Island to know and trust that our GIPS teachers are showing up every day and they are providing all of our students with numerous opportunities to help eat make each and every one of them successful in all their years of learning here.

 

Mitchell Roush  22:22

Beki, I want to ask you the same thing, what's what's a word about public education you want people to know?

 

Beki  Piel  22:27

I just want everyone to know that behind school doors, every adult, a para, a teacher, custodians, principals, everybody's here with that core goal of, in general, creating good people. We are teaching them to read, to write, to do math, all of those things are important too. But we are creating the people that are going to be our future parents, our future caregivers, our future leaders, and we want them to be as successful as possible. And this is some of the hardest work people do, is in public education, and we show up every day to climb that mountain.

 

Mitchell Roush  23:00

I couldn't agree more. Y'all show up and I we are so incredibly grateful. We have such good people here. We really do. Thank you both so much for not only being here, but for everything that you do to champion early childhood education in our community. It is making a huge, huge difference. So thank you absolutely preschool y'all, it is an incredible thing. Thank you so much to Amber O'Hara and to Beki Piel for joining us on the GI PS cast and sharing not only who they are, but why they do what they do, and how they do it, to inspire our preschool students so cool to hear. And of course, thank you listeners for joining us here on "The GIPS Cast"!  If you enjoyed this episode, or you enjoy this podcast, we ask that you give us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform. It will help other people discover us along the way, and it's a great way for us to know how we're doing and sharing these stories. And of course, be sure to check out our district website, GIPS.org.  That's GIPS.org your hub for information, resources, news, all sorts of things that you need from Grand Island Public Schools. Thank you again, listeners for joining us, and of course, we will be coming back to you soon with some more great stories from our district.