June 5, 2010
For 40 years, preschool teacher has followed the Holy Spirit’s call
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Preschool teacher Anita Williams listens to a young student at Holy Family Preschool in Citrus Heights.
Luis Gris/Herald photo
During a post-naptime circle at Holy Family Preschool in Citrus Heights, a small, dark-haired woman in denim overalls sits on a tiny chair in front of two dozen three- and four-year-old children. Wearing a rhinestone tiara and holding a star-tipped wand, preschool teacher Anita Williams squeezes her eyes shut and makes a silent wish. The children watch with great concentration.
She opens her eyes and declares, “I got my wish! I wished for you! And there you are!”
The children are very pleased to have been wished for, and delighted that their Miss Anita got her wish.
Teaching preschool is indeed the work that Williams has wished for all of her life. It is also the work that she believes the Holy Spirit has called her to do.
At 61, Williams has been teaching preschool for 40 years. This milestone anniversary created the occasion for a “Miss Anita Day” at the school, complete with tiara and wand, noted Lucy Eberhardt, director of Holy Family Preschool, but Eberhardt is happy for any excuse to celebrate Williams’ classroom teaching.
“We are so grateful for the spiritual insight that Anita has brought to our school,” Eberhardt said. “She shares her faith with the students throughout the day. Her faith is woven into her teaching.”
Williams’ afternoon praise program after naptime is the heart of the program, Eberhardt said.
Settled on a bright rug in the spacious classroom, the preschoolers listen to Williams begin the familiar afternoon program. “It’s time to praise and pray,” she says to the children.
She calls out: “How do we praise the Lord?”
The children shout out in unison: “With gusto!”
“And what else?” she asks.
“With joy!” they roar.
In response to her next question, “How do we worship the Lord?,” the children and Williams pray together the following litany: “We pray, we listen to his Word, we sing and praise, we declare our faith, we offer our lives, we love one another.” The children obviously know the words by heart.
Then she takes from a bag at her feet a jar of “special oil.”
“My door isn’t squeaky, Miss Anita,” says one boy. Other children make creaking sounds while moving their hands over their chests in imitation of a door opening. Williams gives each child an imaginary squirt of special oil, which they place over their hearts.
“We’re opening our hearts to Jesus,” Williams tells them as she moves among them, oil jar in hand. Then they all pray together: “Dear Jesus, I invite you into my heart, to be my lord and savior. Thank you, Jesus, for dying on the cross just for me. You washed away my sins, and you’re saving a place for me in heaven. I love you, Jesus.”
At the prayer’s end, Williams tells the children that it’s time to plug into Jesus. The children enthusiastically gesture as if plugging an electric cord into a wall, and then she asks, “Do you feel it? Do you feel it?” The children cheer that that they do, and Williams leads them into a high energy song about the power of the Holy Spirit. The children sing loudly and happily, easily making a seque into another upbeat song that calls for oil for their lamps and love in their hearts.
Williams praises the children’s singing with obvious affection, telling them that they sang with joy and gusto! Then she modulates the energy in the room by having them sing more quietly, and then silently, mouthing the words to another song without making a sound. She reminds them that even though they may not make a sound, God hears them anyway — he knows what is in their minds and in their hearts.
Now she’s made the transition to a reading mood. She invites the children to hold onto the edge of the carpet they’re sitting on, which is transformed by her enthusiasm and imagination to magic carpet that carries them up into the air to literature land. When Williams invites the children to peek down over the edge of the carpet to look at the landscape far below, the children peer down and seem to see the sights she describes.
They’re an utterly rapt audience.
When story time ends, the afternoon circle opens and the children go outside to play.
Afterward, Williams explains in an interview that she learned how to teach from her mother, who worked in a preschool when Williams was a teenager and then opened her own preschool when Williams was in college.
“My mother was a very faithful Catholic and she loved children,” Williams recalled. “I’ve learned everything from growing up with her and watching her teach.”
Williams studied early child development in college while working at her mother’s preschool, eventually opening her own school in Vacaville. Hers was a Catholic preschool, she noted, near St. Mary Parish — her home parish at the time — and feeding into St. Mary School.
After moving to Sacramento in 1997, Williams tried working at a couple of secular preschools, she says, but she felt “stifled.”
“I couldn’t pray with the children, together we couldn’t praise Jesus — I just couldn’t do it,” she said.
Williams has been leading the praise program at Holy Family Preschool for eight years now. She teaches all of the academic, social and physical fundamentals that children need, she noted, as do the other preschool teachers, but at Holy Family, they can teach from God’s foundation.
