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Inside The Classroom:
Discovering the Joys of Learning with Beginners

Shera Selzer explains the basics of each station in the beginning of class.

There is barely one inch of white space on the walls adorned with colorful construction paper, posters, artwork and signs that read “We draw!”, “We glue!”, “We color!” as BB&N’s youngest students gather in the center of the classroom.

Beginner teachers Shera Selzer and Joselyn Chavez Dennis stand in front of an easel with a cutout picture of a pig as they begin the day’s lesson: learning all about pigs through a variety of different art projects, such as marble paintings, a “mud” station, and even their very own “pig sty” in the back corner of the room.

“Make sure you wet your hands before you dip them in,” reminds Selzer as she mixes the “mud”—a combination of different colors of paint in a large bucket. “Otherwise you’ll all end up with very sticky hands!”

While it may look like these students are engaging in simple child’s play, it is projects like these, Selzer says, that plant the seeds for these students to flourish in their years to come—at BB&N, and beyond.

“We aim to create an environment that encourages children to explore their surroundings,” says Selzer, who has been teaching early education for the past 23 years, her last five at BB&N. “Projects like these really play to their senses, hook them in, and help them formulate their own ideas, which is crucial at this stage.”

The Beginner curriculum, which is based off core principals from philosopher Jean Piaget, psychologist Lev Vygotsky and Howard Gardner’s book “Multiple Intelligence”, revolves mainly around a hands-on learning experience that encourages children to ask questions and develop social skills with their peers as well as adults.  In addition to fundamental math and English skills, Beginners are now also getting a basic Spanish lesson a few times a month.

“It’s amazing to see how much these kids change by the end of the year,” Selzer says. “They come in with varying degrees of social skills, as some students are only children and others come from big families, but they all leave really understanding what it means to cooperate.”

Each classroom has two teachers, (Dorian Okano and Rania Melki teach the second Beginner class that kindly brought homemade biscuits over for snack time) allowing each student to be extremely well-nurtured—a very important aspect since children learn best when their physical needs are met and they feel psychologically safe and secure, Selzer points out.

“Discovering the joys of learning is the primary goal in this first year of Beginners,” Selzer says. “The Beginners teachers place a great deal of trust in the young child’s innate curiosity and ability to construct their own knowledge. We make space in our curriculum for their ideas to emerge and fully develop, and we value the process of learning as much as any single end product.”

Having just returned from Mass. Audubon's Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary where they observed pigs as well as many other animals as part of their unit on harvests and farm life, Beginners are all too eager to jump into the mud pit.

Nathan Jae-Chan Kwon dips his hands into the slippery brown paint as he looks up and gleefully exclaims: “I’m a mud monster! Ewww, it feels gross!”

“I’d say it’s a good pig day in here because it’s a messy day,” Selzer responds, smiling.