Rock Hill teacher aims to inspire a love of learning through play

Mary Watson’s kindergarten class at Winthrop University’s Macfeat Laboratory School is a place where children can learn to love learning through play.

Singing, dancing, drawing, coloring, painting, writing, hearing stories, reciting rhymes. The day is rich in childhood fun, all intended to help children’s brains and bodies grow in a way that’s appropriate for their age.

For 34 years, Watson has been teaching a Macfeat kindergarten class and serving as a model of early childhood education. Hundreds of Winthrop education students who worked in or observed Watson’s classroom have taken what they learned from her into their own classrooms.

“You can’t go anywhere in Rock Hill with Mary without her running into former college students and the children that she has taught,” said teacher Mary Chamberlain, a longtime colleague at Macfeat.

But Watson’s time at Macfeat, where aspiring teachers at Winthrop and others can observe and learn best practices for the classroom, will come to an end when she retires later this month. She will be honored Sunday in a reception for former students and families at St. John’s United Methodist Church in Rock Hill.

“It’s been a calling, to have this opportunity to work with children, families and college students,” Watson said. “I love being there for the first time they cross the monkey bars, learn to read, tie their shoes or ride a bike.”

Watson, 66, said Macfeat allowed her to teach children in the way she knows is most appropriate, and for them to have a chance to make choices in their learning.

“You can’t mandate and regulate brain development,” said Watson, who has a passionate belief in the need to “allow our children the freedom to be more active and to make an appropriate choice.”

Macfeat director Erin Hamel said she believes the school for 56 children ages 3 to 5 is losing a community treasure. “She has touched the lives of so many children and families.”

Hamel, too, was touched by Watson as an undergraduate student at Winthrop, when she worked in Watson’s classroom.

“What I learned from her was how to apply what I was learning in my college classes,” Hamel said, “because she really lives the practices that we teach our college students.”

Play is the focus of learning, Hamel said, and children are trusted to have some say in what they want to learn and how they want to learn it.

When Hamel got her first teaching job at Rock Hill’s Mount Gallant Elementary School, she sought out Watson’s advice in setting up her classroom to create the best environment for learning.

“She really worked with me, and I had graduated by then,” Hamel said. “But she was still willing to help me work with what I was given.”

Margaret Southwell, a graduate assistant under Watson who teaches kindergarten at Rock Hill’s Finley Road Elementary School, said Watson made learning “an experience” that her children enjoyed.

Southwell learned from Watson “that one of the best things we can do to help children learn is to first love them, and to make the education a positive experience for them.”

Macfeat teaches the same required South Carolina standards as public schools, Watson said, but the approach is more centered on the child.

Watson sees herself as a facilitator for children’s learning, rather than the director of it. Children spend most of the day in learning centers or in group activities that include songs and stories.

At the beginning of the year, Watson asks each child what they want to learn, and makes a list of their responses: Tie my shoes, ABCs, cross the monkey bars, read, count, swing.

Some of the children wanted to learn about dinosaurs, so the class spent a month on that. They read stories, sorted dinosaurs, danced and sang about them, studied their footprints and talked about their measurements. All the activities were related to something the children need to learn, Watson said.

Right now, she said, her class is hatching spring chickens and reading, singing and doing activities related to that.

Kindergarten is a time when children work on fine motor skills, social and emotional development and group cooperation, Watson said, as well as beginning reading and math skills.

But children enter kindergarten at very different levels: Some are early readers, while others don’t yet know their ABCs.

“My job as a teacher is to take them where they are when they come in and move them just as far along that developmental spectrum as I can,” Watson said.

Watson herself learned at Macfeat as a Winthrop undergraduate and later as a graduate assistant. She taught for three years in Mississippi, where her husband was stationed in the U.S. Air Force, and a year in Rock Hill schools before she started to teach at Macfeat in 1982.

Over the years, Watson has seen a big push in kindergarten to 12th-grade education for children to learn, do and accomplish more at a younger age. More direct instruction is another trend.

“That’s not necessarily the best way for most children to learn,” Watson said. Instead, she believes in “a lot of different types of activities, because all children don’t learn in the same way.”

Watson is retiring to spend more time with her retired husband and four grandchildren. But she said she’ll miss her role in helping children begin their learning adventure.

“These children love to read; children love to learn,” Watson said. “That’s what I wanted to create for them – a lifetime love of learning.”

This story was originally published April 30, 2016 at 12:10 PM with the headline "Rock Hill teacher aims to inspire a love of learning through play."