Nobody starts out knowing what to do with a small child. That is the normal condition, not something you got wrong.
Who it’s for
Anyone who ended up in charge of a small child without being trained for it. The toy is out on the floor, the child has lost interest, it is four in the afternoon and there are two hours left. Nothing prepares you for that part, and everybody is guessing.
It is the same afternoon for a teacher, except there are nine of them.
What’s on here
Not ideas for things to do. There are plenty of those already, and no way to tell whether anyone tried them.
What’s here is the part after that: what the children actually did once it was out on the floor, what the adult said when it stalled, where the play went instead, and the afternoons it simply fell apart.
Where it comes from
Teachers in preschool rooms write down what the children played that day — every working day, thousands of rooms. We work on the system those notes are written in, which is how we come to be reading them.
We read and write up what happened. Every name comes out: children, teachers, centers, towns.
What we don’t do
We don’t make anything up, and we don’t stitch two rooms into one story. If something took nine days, it took nine days in one room.
And we leave in the days it didn’t work. Those are half the reason to read this — not so you can copy them, but so the afternoon that goes wrong at your house stops feeling like it is only happening to you.
A note from the person who started this
I got married at twenty-one. My children never went to a preschool room like the ones on this site, and I don’t think I gave them much. They’re both in their mid-twenties now.
Nothing on this site is something I did with them. I read these notes and I recognize what I didn’t know at the time — not because I got it wrong, but because I was twenty-one.
That is the whole reason this exists.