B’ville Nursery School adapts to distance learning

When the staff of Baldwinsville Nursery School said good-bye to their students on a mid-March Monday, they couldn’t have fathomed that it would be for the last time this school year. As the COVID-19 crisis resulted in more uncertainty by the day, teachers decided to lean into feelings of certainty around one sentiment: they were simply not ready to give up on their classroom communities of young learners.

“Our teachers each have school-age children of their own. Knowing that they were going home to face the challenge of managing homeschooling from that vantage point and given the age of our preschool students, I never imagined the possibility of remote learning for us,” said BNS Program Director Julie Madden.

But as the staff stayed in close contact through group texts and emails, it became clear that the team, consisting of three teachers and three teacher assistants, was eager to brainstorm ways to carry on with their classes of little ones.

The first step was setting up Google Classroom pages, which the Baldwinsville Central School District uses with older students. Google Classroom created a space for BNS staff to reach out to kids through videos.

“We all contributed — teachers, teacher assistants, all of us — by posting regular clips,” Madden said.

There were stories read aloud, scavenger hunt challenges, and art project ideas. Some staff members enlisted the help of their families, either to hold the camera for recording or to be a fresh face and voice as presenters.

That was a good start, but the staff knew without the ability to interact with students, Google Classroom by itself would only serve effectively as a temporary bridge connecting kids and teachers. Now, over two months later, teachers are thinking up ways to make the final days of class time together special and fun for their students with whom they remain bonded and engaged.

On the first of April, parents received a letter announcing the launch of BNS Cyber School. Along with the letter, there was a new class calendar and starting April 6, each class gathered in virtual classrooms on a regularly-scheduled basis (twice a week for 3-year-olds and three times per week for 4-year0olds).

Teachers prepared by researching Zoom video conferencing. They observed their own children’s use of it at home and there were more-than-a-few trial run sessions among the group in effort to learn all of the hosting features available. One thing they knew for sure right away was that the control function known as “mute all” would probably come in pretty handy for group Zoom sessions with 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds!

Since then, from a distance and yet, still together, BNS teachers have become masters of video chat hosting while kids in the program have celebrated birthdays with the school’s traditional birthday jump, completed hands-on science experiments (with lists of needed materials given to parents ahead of time), gone on a virtual field trip to the farm, honored their mommies on Mother’s Day, had a surprise music and movement guest appearance, did show and tell, and “met” their teachers for next year.

There is simply no way to sugarcoat the loss of one-third of this school year for any aged classroom community. In the case of preschool, nothing can replace the annual field trips to Beaver Lake Nature Center, the Baldwinsville Public Library and the Post Office.

For BNS students going to kindergarten in the fall, not having the Kindness Karnival (earned from a year of accumulating acts of kindness in the classroom) and sanctuary-based graduation ceremony where the parents cry and the kids look forward to the cupcake celebration afterward, is nothing short of heart-wrenching.

“To have had this unceremonious ending, however, has given rise to some amazing growth for us as individual professionals and as a collaborative staff unit. While one teacher became the go-to staff member for all things technical, others were leaders with generating creative ways to teach through a screen,” Madden said.

Madden noted that another silver lining of the spring’s unfortunate circumstances was that it has served as a potent reminder of how valued a little nursery school program like Baldwinsville

Nursery School is, by families in the Baldwinsville community.

“Their open-minded, trusting and steadfast support of the nursery school parents through all of this has been truly remarkable. The fact that Cyber School attendance has remained steady is testimony of how important what we have to offer their children is to them,” Madden said.

Madden said the BNS team takes pride in the manner in which they successfully followed the example of the BCSD when it came to providing continued learning for their students. They feel exhilarated by and are likely to incorporate some of the new ways of bridging the home-school gap into their preschool curriculum going forward. Ultimately, however, they can’t wait for a new school year with a restored opportunity to get back to the way they do things best — in person and in a “little kids” kind of way.