Personal Kanban in the classroom is one area that I am highly passionate about. Why? I have seen it in action, first-hand in the preschool classroom. As a teacher it is exciting when your students are excited about learning.The first Personal Kanban we introduced at preschool was an ABC's Kanban. We used this for 26 weeks, each week introducing a new letter for the students to learn.
Preschool ABC's Kanban
When we began on our evolving classroom journey we had just a few simple goals:
We wanted to the classroom Personal Kanban to easily understood by parents and the teachers alike.
We wanted the students to excel at what had traditionally been a very unappealing and difficult part of the preschool classroom activity-learning to write the letters. We wanted to excite the children about learning not think of it as a chore.
Using this Kanban with our students we learned that theexcitement from the children grew every week with each letter they completed on their task card. Students were excited to share their work with other children in the classroom. Students wanted to collaborate on the chalkboard writing their letters, teaching other studentshow to write letters. The students were waiting at the board before their name is called to come over with their task card, in anticipation of receiving a sticker reward for a job well done. We had a completely engaged classroom environment.We had many, many retrospective talks about the board, we had more Kaizen moments than I can list. It was like standing back watching a puzzle magically come together piece by piece every week.Week after week students began going above and beyond, even turning their task cards over to more work!
Preschool alphabet learning task cards
We realized we didn't have to write the students names on the cards anymore because they began to write their names on their own on the cards.
Examples of student written names ABC's Kanban
We were amazed by our ABC's Kanban and how much the students embraced their learning experience. When we were wrapping up our parent-teacher conferences, when speaking with the parents I heard the following statements, “My child loved working on her task card it made her feel important.”“To have all the cards for my child to be able to look back and see all the letters he learned, I wasn’t just telling him, I was showing him, he was able to see all he’s learned.” And finally one parent remarked to me “He was so excited to get into class to show you his card, week after week his excitement grew, he’s been so proud of his work.” The 4 & 5 year old preschool class continues to use this ABC's Kanban successfully.
This an updated post that originally appeared on the Nothing is Out of Reach blog.