'Map of the heart'

WILSON CREEK — All the moms and dads and uncles and grandmas and special friends made Megan Walter’s tiny kindergarten class seem even smaller.

They all listened to short stories written by their students. They heard the class sing a song, they shared tea and juice, brownies and strawberries. And one by one they gave their guests a “map of their heart,” with the names of all the people who are important to them.

“It’s super sweet,” said Amanda Unruh, whose son Payton is in Walter’s class.

He comes over to his small desk, where his mother and his uncle sit on tiny chairs, with a paper plate full of strawberries. His mother disapproved.

“There are still some left for others!” Payton said.

Everyone was gathered in this tiny classroom for the Mother and Father Tea Party, a time to bring together all nine of Wilson Creek’s kindergarten students and their parents (or favorite adults) for the end of the school year.

“We’ve done this every year,” Walter said. “It used to be just moms, but as families changed, we changed this too.”

Walter has been hosting this end-of-year party for six years at Wilson Creek. But this will be her last year here, as Walter is taking a job teaching kindergarten in Odessa, where she lives.

She said she’ll miss the commute through the scrubland from Odessa to Wilson Creek, and that the class she teaches will more than double in size — to 21 kindergartners.

Walter said loves teaching kindergarten.

“I like seeing the immediate growth and change,” she said. “There’s a real excitement for learning. They’re like little sponges, soaking it all up.”

Walter explained to the gathered adults what a kindergarten writing project looks like. It begins as a series of scribbles and drawings and a few words in a notebook, she said, though by Easter, the kids have started writing whole sentences.

“This is their sloppy copy,” Walter said, holding up a notebook for all the parents to see. “We talked about the way they spelled their words, and there’s a grown-up way to spell the words. And I told them that for today, because grown-ups don’t know how to read kindergarten spelling very well, we had to put the kindergarten words away and use the grown-up words.”

The kids together read a poem about all the different kinds of families there are, and then sang a little song — “Special people make a family.”

“Are you nervous?” Walter asked her nine students as they gathered in front of the class.

“I was nervous since yesterday,” said Colbie Didericksen as the music began.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com