Teacher Donald Hawkins shouts enthusiastically to his 3- and 4-year-old students: “Can you name any animals that hop?”
The answers trickle in from the sleepy but smiling youngsters: a kangaroo, a frog, a rabbit. They decide to mimic the frog. It’s 9:30ish in the morning inside Browne Education Campus’s comfortably warm gymnasium in Northeast Washington. Fast-tempoed music gets the kids in the mood to hop, and off they go, rhythmically squatting and bouncing across the room. When the music stops, the children rise, a little more awake.
“Are you ready?” Hawkins yells. “I can’t hear you!”
“Ready!” they reply.