The New Old Mrs. Taupenot

A new, or rather, new again thought for the coming year: sharing time. This is not a new thought at all to me or anyone else. I used to do it every day in my first-grade bilingual classroom and new it was powerful.

Many years ago I had an excruciatingly shy little boy, David, with a prosthetic eye who was very self-conscious of it and never shared it with any of his classmates. After being found out by a neighbor kid, he decided to take the leap and share his eye with the class. In my small-group rotation sharing time, four times David's mom carefully popped that eye out with what looked like a golf tee and showed his classmates. Of course, we got a few "ewwww"s but mostly the kids were fascinated and I could feel David's relief of telling his secret. It might have brought even a few tears to his mom and my eyes. It's actually a good thing he did share because a couple of weeks later his eye fell out during Writer's Workshop. David was too shy to say anything rather he held it in his dirty little palm with a nervous smile. I heard quiet little cries of help to me from the rest of the class "David's eye fell out." Well, I knew just what to do since he and his Mom had shown us! So after a few panicked moments, I lined the children up to wash my hands in the bathroom (we were in a trailer) and I popped his eye back in and adjusted it to be straight. We, the whole class, felt very pleased with ourselves at that moment and we marched right back to resume WW.

A couple of years ago, I left that classroom to come East and felt the pressure of a new curriculum with lots of testing, so I threw the baby out with the water. Introducing the New Old Mrs. Taupenot - the one who embraces sharing time. I won't be the only one in the classroom who cheers when they hear what we'll be doing next school year.

To name just a few benefits of sharing time:
1. personalizing instruction to make it more meaningful and powerful to the child,
2. offer opportunities for my ELLs to talk and listen about things in a comfortable and exciting atmosphere
3. to give all children that needed oral language development, not only in presenting but also in asking questions of the presenter
4. to encompass comprehension strategies through oral language: predict/infer, clarify, question, summarize
5. create great topics for writing about

And to give it a more sophisticated twist, I may call it "Community Sharing Time". As suggested by educator Margaret M. Williams in Suite101.com "While Show and Tell is typically associated with early primary grade classes, this model can be used with students of any age. A simple name change, to something like Community Sharing Time, can turn this important lesson opportunity into an experience to look forward to."

I can't wait!