Teachers Give Feedback on New S.M.A.R.T. Pre-K Program

We at the Minnesota Learning Resource Center (MLRC) greatly value teacher feedback, especially in this first year of launching S.M.A.R.T. Pre-K within the “public” early childhood community. So for this issue of S.M.A.R.T. News, we asked pre-k teachers Lynette Galchutt, Katie Auge, Jessy Jessen, Sara Line and Annie Oftedahl from Longfellow School in Northfield, Minnesota to provide us with some feedback on how the new S.M.A.R.T. Pre-K program is functioning in its first year at their school.

After Galchutt, Auge, Jessen, Line and Oftedahl attended a S.M.A.R.T. Pre-K Workshop last summer, Gary Lewis, principal at Longfellow School, gave them permission to turn their motor room into a S.M.A.R.T. room. The teachers tackled S.M.A.R.T. head on and immediately set up obstacle courses and stations in the room that include the following S.M.A.R.T. activities: Hopscotch, Alligator Crawl, Balance Dome, Sit and Spin, Slap Track, Pencil Roll, Rebounder, Overhead Ladder, Balance Beam and Tactile Trackers.

Students do these activities in the S.M.A.R.T. Room and constantly ask when they will visit the Room again. Considering that some of the students are only at the school for a few hours twice a week, the teachers are making a tremendous S.M.A.R.T. effort by having students visit the S.M.A.R.T. Room once a week and embedding S.M.A.R.T. Activities within their curriculum.

 When students first arrive at school, they complete the following fine motor activities: assembling nuts and bolts, sorting with tongs, beading, finding hidden objects in rice, stacking dice with pencil erasers, flipping pennies, putting toothpicks in salt and pepper shakers, putting clothes pins around a container and putting pennies in tennis ball slots or Pringles cans. The activities are performed at stations in the classrooms.  

The teachers also try to make the most of the time they have with the students by changing the obstacle courses and themes every two months and using fun songs to keep activities interesting. For example, Longfellow students sing the following to the tune of “My Little Teapot” during the Popcorn activity:

I’m a little popcorn in a pot.
Heat me up and watch me pop.
When I get all fat and white, then I’m done.
Popping corn is lots of fun!

Despite their weekly time crunch, Galchutt, Auge, Jessen, Line and Oftedahl are doing all they can to make S.M.A.R.T. fun and effective. They will use the assessment Longfellow School created to examine fine motor, gross motor, math, print awareness, self-help and social skills at the end of the year. This will help test S.M.A.R.T. Pre-K’s impact.  The assessment is a compilation of different assessments, the Northfield School District’s Scope and Sequence and the MN Early Learning Standards.

If you have any additional tips or advice on implementing S.M.A.R.T. in the pre-k setting, email the Longfellow School pre-k teachers at Annie.Oftedahl@nfld.k12.mn.us.