Meaning Emerges

There are many activities we do with children that they don't understand at first. But if we repeat the activities often enough, they gradually become meaningful. This year we kept a running tally of our days in the Gray School. Every day we added a tally mark, then we sang our song ("How Many Days Have We Been in the Gray School?"), and then we counted our groups of five to find the answer. At first the Lark did not seem to understand this activity, but now he does. He understands that we add only one mark for each day, and that if we count up all the marks, we can see how many days we've been in the Gray School.

The important point is, there are a lot of activities that they don't bother doing with the "self-contained" kids at the Lark's school, because they think it wouldn't be meaningful for them (like Star of the Week and Art Awareness and poetry and class performances and class pets), but if the kids had been doing them since kindergarten, then these activities would have become meaningful by now.