Episode #2: Preschool Zoom? Teacher Kaylene to the Rescue! (featuring Kaylene Smith)
I’m hula hooping with excitement to introduce this episode’s guest! She is one of my favorite people and someone I’ve known for 30 years. She is Mary Poppins magical and Madeline Albright smart. She’s a spoonful of sugar sweet and is as playful as a litter of maltise-toy poodles. A voracious reader and a sliver shy, she is Jedi wise.
But more on our guest shortly.
In this shared moment, we’re all looking for new ways forward. We’re pivoting, shifting, turning, and spinning. We are taking action, launching lifeboats, and swimming for shore. Pivot is an expression of resilience. Not many areas of our lives are exempt from this new reality of external pressure forcing us to sink or swim. In some areas we simply tread water to wait out this period of biological arm-twisting.
We have all seen examples of people adapting to the pandemic. We zoom, we walk, we work from home, we go on long road trips, take up new activities that we never imagined we would (LIKE PODcasting), we adopt pets and even kids. Some are easy pivots, some harder, some long overdue, and some seem downright untenable.
For those of you with kids, especially small kids, how has this gone down? What’s happening here? Thinking of this gives me a little hypertension. Our kids have also had to find new ways to move forward.
This episode’s guest is Kaylene Smith. She has a Master of Arts in Teaching from Willamette University. She is a former elementary school teacher, has taught Pre-K, Kindergarten, first grade and reading, and served as Parent and Childhood educator for South Puget Sound Community College. A preschool teacher at Westside Cooperative Preschool for the past 12 years here in Olympia, she is determined to pivot her preschoolers to a meaningful experience during this pandemic. Let me welcome Teacher Kaylene Smith to “A Hat Tip for Hands.” and a quick shout to her remarkable son, Owen, for his musical talents for this episode.
Post episode commentary: This episode was like rolling the clock back 50 years to my Whirly Birds preschool class. We played, probably finding bats under hats, made friends, ate graham crackers, and sang songs. Kaylene transported me back to a carefree time, and left me feeling happy for her students. I look forward to a Part 2 with Teacher Kaylene.
