Choosing a class name is a wonderful Barrow tradition! While we will always be the Silver Room, we also wanted to choose another special “Together Name” for our class. For our young students, the idea of naming something is abstract, so we incorporated some familiar and concrete elements into our process. Over the past few months, we’ve explored names in many forms. Our Hello songs, daily greetings, and morning check-in routine helped us learn our classmates’ names.

We have also been practicing voting by giving the children the opportunity to vote for snacks and stories on certain days. At first, we used puppets to model voting and talk about what could happen if we didn’t get our first choice – we might feel disappointed, angry, or sad, and that’s okay. Inviting children to vote on manageable, teacher-facilitated choices allows them to feel a sense of agency and participation at school.

For some practice, we voted on having pretzels or rice cakes as part of our snack! We talked about how rice cakes got the most votes, so we would eat them that day, but we would still enjoy pretzels another day. Some friends were excited, and some were disappointed. Learning to tolerate and navigate different feelings in themselves and others is a large part of children’s social-emotional development.

After some practice rounds, we were ready to begin voting on a name. To start our process, we talked about how we could think of a name… maybe it could be something we love in our classroom? We immediately thought of our beloved pumpkins and squashes, which have sparked such rich play, exploration, and curiosity over the past several months. These natural items became an integral part of our class during the fall, and the children would affectionately refer to them as “squashies.” We decided our class name would be the Pumpkins or the Squashies! below are some photos of our voting process. During meetings, the children used their photographs (which also have their names written on them) to make a choice. Using physical objects and photos of their faces helps concretize this process for the children.

On our first vote, we counted each line and realized we had a tie! We decided to take one more vote in case anyone changed their mind, and if not, we would combine the names. On our second vote, some friends made a new choice, and the Pumpkin won.

We are The Pumpkins!

Below are some photos of our voting process. Each child had a turn to come up and use their picture to vote.

The winning pumpkin ate snack with us! One friend even said, “Smells so squashie!” Squashie or pumpkin, we’re here for it all 🙂

Below are some photos of our Winter Party! We had such a wonderful time with everyone. Thank you for joining us and making it a special morning for the children!

Happy holidays and Happy New Year to our Pumpkins!!