September is synonymous with “back to school,” but in the 4-year-old class at our Escalera Head Start, Lead Teacher Katherine Beltran and Assistant Teacher Saptashikha Chowdhury have been actively preparing their students for September since June. That’s because all of their students will be entering kindergarten this fall. 

It’s a big transition, Ms. Katherine notes, and the children may have a lot of apprehensions about being in a new school with new teachers, classmates, routines, and expectations. 

Ms. Katherine and her staff began by introducing the children to one of the classic stories of metamorphosis — that of the caterpillar turning into a butterfly — but with a twist: They had the students act out the transformation themselves, starting by scrunching up into a ball to represent the egg, wiggling like a caterpillar, crouching down to mimic the chrysalis stage, and culminating in the butterfly yoga pose, which the children had already learned.