When friends ask where Huck’s going to kindergarten and I tell them “at a progressive education school called Muscota,” they ask what that means.  Since I love talking about it (and since I love the word progressive), I’ll go ahead and do so right here on the Adventures of Huck!  At Muscota instead of grades the teachers give students written narratives several times a year.  Instead of text books, teachers use “real books” to instruct the children on history, social studies and all the other subjects. Huck will have this very same class and very same teacher next year for first grade before going on to the mixed 2nd/3rd grade class.  When we have teacher conferences coming up in November Huck has to be there, too, for his assessment matters as much as his teacher’s and ours do, and he has a say in what he wants to learn next.   Along with his classroom teacher Marilyn and assistant Lucilla, Huck also has Dayna the drama teacher, Maggie the art teacher, Jackie the cultural studies teacher and Marian the literacy teacher come in and work with the class several times a week.  Every Wednesday morning the entire school gathers in the gym for Town Meeting where they sing their Muscota song (“We come from the river!  We come from the river!  Go back to the river!  Turn the world around!” etc.) and share their work and stories with each other, building community and creating confident public speakers.  I could go on and on and on …

Over the weekend Huck told me, “Oh, I LOVE school.  I NEVER want to leave.”  He also told me that his class discussed their hopes and dreams for the year, and his was that he wants to learn to read.  When I picked him up from school this afternoon he had over two thousand things to tell me about his very busy day.  The main news was that they finally got out their writing journals, something Huck has looked forward to ever since we bought them at Staples over the summer.  The children were given time to write in them and were told to use “kids’ writing” instead of “book writing.”  Kids’ writing, Huck explained, means they sound out the words and do their best.  Always up to a challenge (to say the least), Huck drew a picture from the Little Red Lighthouse Festival over the weekend and then chose the following sentence to begin his journal (I will be using book writing): “This is me stamping my envelope filled with lemon basil seeds.” 

I can’t imagine what this sentence looks like in his little journal at school, but the thought of it has made me smile for the last several hours.  And since coming home he’s been writing like a madman all over his notebooks and random pieces of paper.  “Do we use kids’ writing in this apartment?” he asked.

You bet we do!