It is always interesting to reflect on what influenced your career choice. I'm pretty sure I decided to become a teacher thanks to Mrs Dawney's beautiful chalk drawings on the blackboard. I always looked forward to the princesses or spring flowers, or whatever delights were awaiting us on the blackboard on Mondays.
Mrs Dawney was my kindergarten teacher and she was lovely. Unfortunately I wasn't with her very long because my mother enrolled me late (see the 'buying shoes blog'). Not all that many children went to preschool in those days so nearly everyone would cry when they had to leave their mothers for the first time. As all my classmates had already been at school for months they were used to leaving their mothers and there wasn't a tear. I on the other hand had never been away from Mutti and I sobbed. I sobbed with relief to see her again at the end of the day so she assumed I had been distraught all day, even of I had had a thoroughly good time for most of it. Years later, when I was a kindergarten teacher myself, I always made a point of ringing mothers who felt terrible leaving crying children as soon as their little one had settled down and was engrossed in a fun activity, to let them know that all was well, because Mutti told me that she had always felt bad all day.
The kindergarten room was the largest in the school and was used as our assembly hall as well. There were low blackboards around the walls and little pastel coloured tables and chairs all around the edge of the room. At the front of the room was a piano, the big teacher's blackboard and Mrs Dawney's desk.
There was a set of 'mats' which were unrolled and put on the floor when we sat crosslegged listening to stories or singing. We also sat on these mats when we had assembly. They were hard and thin and were dark red or green in the hope, I guess, of trying to disguise how grubby they became. After lunch in the kindergarten room we were supposed to have a sleep so we lay down on them as well.
I loved the activities we did in kindergarten. We had wooden templates of animals that you would trace around and then carefully, not going out of the lines, decorate or colour in. Sometimes we had specific instructions like putting vertical coloured stripes on the animals. My favourite was the 'free choice' where you were allowed to do whatever decoration you liked on your traced animal. I can remember choosing to do brown spots all over a dog shape and telling Mrs Dawney that it was a Dalmatian. Some people who lived close by always had Dalmatians. She got me to take my picture all around the school showing the other teachers who all put star stamps on it, but I can't help thinking there was more to my picture that I wasn't aware of, like the time I got a little girl to take the 'mouse' she had made at home as a craft activity to all the teachers in the school. The 'mouse' was a tampon on which she had drawn eyes and stuck little ears. It was very creative. I wonder what that little girl's mother thought when she went home and proudly told her that every teacher in the school had seen it.
To my absolute delight and amazement we were all given an activity book featuring David, Sue and Wendy. There were dotted shapes to trace and then you had to join up the mothers to their babies (mother duck to ducklings etc) and statements such as 'Sue has a blue dress' so you would colour it in. Lots of activities which I found easy because I was fairly good at wielding a pencil. My book was always neat and I couldn't understand why other children made such a mess. It earned me lots of star stamps too which made me try even harder.
A great daily pleasure was the singing and dancing to Mrs Dawney's piano playing and I joined in with enthusiasm.
Another thing I really loved, as did the other children, was drawing on the little child height blackboards. We were given bits of broken chalk to work with and I always thought it must be marvellous to be able to take a brand new whole unused stick of chalk out of its box.
Finger painting was another wonderful activity that I wished we could do every day. And cutting out shapes and then pasting them with the glue that had been especially mixed was fun too.
Kindergarten was enjoyable and I never realised that I was learning things. We all loved Mrs Dawney, unlike other teachers in the Infants' School who were feared. She was always kind and understanding and was the kindergarten teacher at Mosman Infants' for many years. I visited her to tell her that I also wanted to become a teacher when I was finishing high school. She still remembered me and was very encouraging and wished me well.
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