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From the Head of School (May 2009)
Last week our school community was treated to a first: a kindergarten play! Not just any play, but one performed on our stage in the Big Exciting Space, with sets and costumes, and music playing through the sound system. And the next day, students and teachers even had their own cast party.
Written by Teacher Leslie Grill, the play was officially titled, “we love our world, we love our friends, but we need we to be.” Students as clouds, the sun and stars, trees and flowers, birds and bees, and the moon and a howling dog. Those of us in the audience marveled at our young actors’ ability to memorize their line, both spoken and sung. Although the level of nerves varied, the play came off without a hitch.
Traditionally, kindergarten is the year when children begin make monumental leaps in their ability to care for others, to empathize, and to complete formal work projects with one or more of their classmates.
Taking turns, sharing, and waiting to begin what might be a favorite activity. As kids grow, their community expands beyond their friends and classmates to ultimately include people of whom students only know through reading about them. Empathy and sharing can eventually, in other words, include the world.
For these kindergarten students, “we need we” allowed them to act out one of the most important testimonies of Friends: Stewardship. As a pretend ecosystem each kindergarten actor made clear to the audience that the system – the community – needed all of its components to provide something necessary to the others, in ways direct and indirect. It was particularly touching to see the “clouds” bend closer to the “flowers” on stage in order that the rain would have a better chance at soaking the soil. The “flowers” in turn, moved closer to the “bees” to facilitate make believe pollination.
I discovered afterwards that these moments were instinctive amongst the kids, not blocked by the teacher directors. Our students seem to be learning their lessons well!
I like to think of our kindergarten as planting the seeds of Quaker testimonies, hoping that as they move through the grades that testimonies like Stewardship can become integral to the lives that they will lead. “we need we” will be memorable for our community; especially when we can marvel at how those “trees” and “bees” become the leaders we will count upon to take care of our world.
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