I'm reading "Teaching in the Key of Life". Some colleagues were raving about this author (who has been around for quite awhile but had escaped my radar somehow). I'm raving now too. It's always a boost to find an educator who really understands education! (and agrees with your long help principles to boot!) Enjoy this except and then go check out her books at the library or the book store. The link by her name under "My Child Development Heroes" will take you to her books sold online by Red Leaf Press. "Take it away, Mimi!"
Excerpt from an essay titles “I’m Worried About Our Children” by Mimi Brodsky Chenfeld in her book “Teaching in the Key of Life”
When teachers and parents discuss ways of enriching the lives of young children- ways of helping them to learn to love learning- the best suggestions are the oldest, most natural, most obvious, most simple. They are so easy that we forget that we already know them:
Hang loose and relax.
Talk with your children. Share and compare observations, questions, experiences, wishes, wondering. Laugh together.
List to music of all kinds. Enjoy the music. Let it inspire movement, art, stories, quiet times.
Read to and with your children. Surround them with stories, poems, riddles, plays. Read to yourself. (What books to you love? If you want children to love reading, show them by your example.) Discover the delight of creating your own stories, your own writings. Children already know about this. Keep the flame burning.
Walk with the children. Walk with awareness. Stop! Look! Listen! Be a person on whom nothing is lost. Martin Buber believed that everything is waiting to be hallowed by you. What do you hallow? A walk around the street with an aware, responsive, sensitive, involved adult is more enjoyable and valuable to a child than a trip around the world with a rigid, closed-minded, authoritarian tour leader.
Encourage imaginative responses, original thinking, freedom of expression, new experiences. Don’t be a critic or a judge. Be a person who rejoices in your own works and the works of others.
Use the resources at your doorstep: libraries, museums, art galleries, parks, playgrounds, construction sites, gardens, zoos, bakeries, fruit stands, orchards, street signs, parking lots. The word boring should not belong in the vocabulary of any child.
Our kids don’t need expensive gimmicks, shiny educational tools, designer jigsaw puzzles, video games, and heavy-handed adult intervention in their daily education. Let’s not just rely on machines, no matter how great is their potential in the learning process.
Our children need an environment sweetened with tender loving care, encouragement, inspiration, role models, and time-time to play, pretend, explore, experiment, and wonder; time to develop at their own pace and in their own special rhythms. When children learn in such save, supportive settings under the gentle, constant guidance of loving adults, they prove over and over again that they are among the most creative members of this gifted and talented human family of ours.
Be ready for astonishment. Those of us who have spent most of our lives working with children know that, when we let them, they teach us about looking at everyday, ordinary miracles with fresh eyesight and insight. Children take us on a journey to our own beginning when the world was new and waiting to be discovered again.
We have a lot to learn.
