This time of year is hard on Anna Bernstein. As a pre-kindergarten teacher at Webster School in Weehawken, she becomes attached to her class of 4-year-olds. And then June comes around and she’s forced to let them go.
“You see the children grow so much,” Bernstein explained last week. “Socially, academically. You spend so much time with them, getting to know them very well, and then it’s time for them to move on. It really is a bittersweet moment.”
Webster’s other pre-kindergarten teacher, Maria Desharnais, agreed. “It’s amazing to see the transformation of the kids,” Desharnais said. “They come to you shy and innocent and somewhat afraid and they all blossom. I hate to see them leave. You put all the work in with them and then they go on to someone else.”
Although the teachers are somewhat misty-eyed at the kids’ departures, they acknowledge their students’ rites of passage with an annual graduation celebration.
“Each year, we pick a theme and build the whole show around the theme,” said Bernstein, who has coordinated the year-end production along with Desharnais at Webster. The celebration has occurred since the inception of the pre-K program 10 years ago.
This year, the theme was “Coming to America,” featuring all the different ethnic backgrounds the students come from.
“Weehawken is a true melting pot,” Bernstein said. “There is so much diversity when it comes to the ethnic makeup of the students. Of the 40 kids in the pre-K program, we have about 30 different countries represented.” The production is highly anticipated and teachers and parents get involved in creating the scenery.
“The sets are always amazing,” Desharnais said. “We have a lot of our teachers’ aides who do a lot of the work in building the sets. We just come up with the idea for a theme and it just sort of takes off from there. It’s a very talented crew.”
Desharnais and Bernstein present their ideas for a theme to art teacher Donna Mamsmann, who acts as the architect and devises a set design.
“With all the parents in the gym, you have to measure whether it can all fit,” Desharnais said. “But Donna knows.”
One of the parents contributed a picture of the Manhattan skyline. “We scaled it down so it could fit in the gym and then built around the dimensions,” Desharnais said.
Desharnais also credited the efforts of parent Kathy McLaughlin for building the elaborate set, complete with a Statue of Liberty. More than 20 parents volunteered their time in helping with the sets.
“We really had a lot of parental support,” Bernstein said. “It was all done by parents on their free time.”
“When you see the sets for the first time, it really blows you away,” Desharnais said. “We don’t get many chances to rehearse with the set, because they’re working in the gym, so when you see it for the first time, it’s really amazing.”
At show time, the children sang and danced with an audience of wide-eyed parents and friends watching every move.
They performed to Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Rockin’ in the USA,” the classic, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” and standards like “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Grand Old Flag.”
“We try to pick songs that they will enjoy,” Bernstein said. “We start with the songs and then add the steps. With kids that age, it is very time consuming.”
“Some of the first practices didn’t go so well,” Desharnais said. “You really never know how they’re going to handle it, first singing with us, then in front of an audience. But it’s amazing to see the transformation. Some of the shyest kids get so pumped to perform. The last two days of rehearsal, I knew we had a good show. The kids all feed off each other. So it works.”
“It’s a shame we can’t keep these kids,” Bernstein said. “We just finally had them broken in.”