Teaching and learning from preschoolers
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is commonly misunderstood as the "pleasure chemical." In modern slang, we talk of "dopamine hits" to describe what people are doing when they, say, spend hours scrolling their social media feeds or waste a day playing video games. Dopamine is involved in those activities, of course, but not the way many people think. It doesn't serve as a reward, but rather as a…
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "Action is character." As has often been the case, this artists was just asserting something that modern scientists are now confirming: not only do our actions reveal who we are, they also become who we are. In other words, neuroscience and sociological research are finding that when we act kindly (even if we don't feel kind), when we act courageously (even if we don't…
Cry contagion , or contagious crying , amongst human infants is a well documented phenomenon, one that anyone who has worked with groups of young people has learned about first hand. One infant's crying triggers nearby infants, especially during their first year of life. This response tends to be much weaker when babies hear recordings of their own crying or other loud sounds. It seems to be…
For a time, the children gathered together around the workbench where they made things with junk using glue guns. Others chose to create using construction paper, tape, and staplers. They talked quietly amongst themselves as they worked, sharing tools and ideas as they went. After a while, in ones and twos, they declared their projects complete and began to move away into the rest of the…
The old world is dying. The new one is slow in appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise. ~Fiamma Montezemolo May you live in interesting times. It's an Ancient Chinese curse. Likewise it's a blessing, in the same sense that "May all your dreams come true" can go either way. As adults, we look around and see monsters: bigotry, technology, billionaires, corruption, war, alienation, mental…
When I went to bed on Wednesday night, I hoped I'd done enough to deal with an ant invasion into our home. I'd anticipated it. We live within the jurisdiction of a home owners association and periodically, when ant populations begin to surge, they lay down insecticide. Whenever they do this, within 30 minutes, the ants come inside. Of course, they're escaping the tragedy and my home, being…
"Love isn't a state of perfect caring," wrote Mister Rogers. "It is an active noun like struggle." I hate to quibble with the great man, but love and struggle are also verbs. The English language is already largely comprised of nouns, which is, as Robin Wall-Kimmerer commented in her book Braiding Sweetgrass , "appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things." Physicist Carlo Rovelli tells us…
As you step onto a preschool playground or a play-based classroom, the first thing visitors are struck by is the never-ending swirl of bodies in motion. Adult visitors to Woodland Park have always stopped at the gate or doorway seemingly afraid to get in the way as children move from one thing to the next, leaping, skipping, swinging, crawling, jumping, jiggling, bending, and reaching. Even when…
I recently learned a new word: holobiont . A holobiant is an animal or plant and all the symbiotic microorganisms living on or inside it, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses. I'm one, you're one. "We ourselves are not singular," writes Rebecca Solnit in her new book The Beginning Comes After the End , "each of us, but plural, a cooperative community. About half the cells in our body do not have…
The opposite of play is not work, it's rote. ~Dr. Edward Hallowell Our outdoor classroom is one big slope and within that slope there are many ups and downs, reflecting our city which is built on hills. We're forever experimenting with gravity out there, rolling and flowing things downhill or dragging and pushing things up. There are parts of the space that are so steep one needs a running start…
In his classic book A Sand County Almanac , Aldo Leopold, the man sometimes credited as the father of modern wildlife ecology, wrote, "It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it." He was writing specifically about natural places, but he could have been talking about just about any perfect thing with which we humans…
Before I'd even met the two-year-old boy, his mother told me, "He has an irrational fear of pinecones." This was important for me to know because there was a pine tree on the playground. And she knew it. I quickly considered how I should respond if she asked me to remove pinecones from the playground. Thankfully, that's not where she was going. Instead, she said, "I wonder how he's going to react…
In the sitcom Seinfeld , the character Elaine Benes is annoyed that a friend doesn't think she's up to being a babysitter: "I couldn't raise a kid? C'mon, I love bossing people around." She, of course, finds out that bossing kids around is a sucker's game. No body likes to be bossed around. The mentally healthy response is to resist. The adult ratchets it up. The resistance grows stronger or goes…
"No climbing to the top!" When our daughter was in kindergarten, her school installed an amazing rope-and-steel climbing structure. The kindergartners were forbidden from climbing to the very top, which meant that adults were always hovering around the thing, "reminding" the children when they got too high. One day, I asked her if she was loving the new climber. She replied, "It's kind of in the…
Yoan Capote (detail from Isla , oil, nails, fish hooks, artist's blood) I often talk about my blogging habit as the core of my reflective practice as an educator. I generally don't sit down and write because I have answers, but rather because something has happened that intrigues me, or challenges me, and I want to understand it better. Maybe it's a child doing something. Maybe it's something I've…
They say there are no stupid questions, but I beg to differ. We hear stupid questions almost every time adults and young children are together. For instance, a child is painting at an easel, exploring color, shape, and motion, experimenting with brushes, paper, and paint. There is an adult watching over her shoulder who points and asks, "What color is that?" This is a stupid question. Here's…
We start speaking with our babies from the moment they're born. We know they don't understand what we're saying, of course, but that's beside the point. If we ask them questions, we don't expect answers. If we give them instructions, we don't expect them to follow them. If we tell them the name of something, we know there is no way it means anything to them. We speak with them because human…
As a play-based preschool teacher, I make sure, every day, to have at least two opportunities for making art available to the kids, one indoors and one outdoors. Typically, the outdoor provocation offers the opportunity to get good and messy, although it can get messy indoors as well. Sometimes I go to great effort in preparing things, such as when we do pendulum painting or are melting crayons to…
I recently ran outside in the middle of the night with a baseball bat to chase away an intruder who was obviously trying to do mischief. My neighbors are torn over whether I was courageous or foolhardy. Several have expressed the feeling that I was "lucky." The man might have been armed. He might have overwhelmed me with superior quickness and strength. I might have actually hit him with the bat,…
We were all afraid of Mr. Turner. He was the principal at Meadowfield Elementary in Columbia, SC, and, it was rumored, he had a wooden paddle in his office with "holes drilled in it" so he could swing it faster. Even as an eight-year-old, I thought the physics of that sounded off, but I sure didn't want to test it. The most sure-fire way for a teacher to shut down disruptive behavior was to…
We never gave our daughter chores to do around the house when she still lived with us. This runs against the current of most of the parenting counsel out there. Her school officially recommended it for all families. Even our pediatrician suggested, when she was still a baby, that we would want her to do chores. "It's good for them." "It teaches them about responsibility." "It's how they pull their…
Growing up, family dinners weren't exactly sacred, but they were our default mode. Most evenings during my first 18 years of life involved the five of us sitting down around the dining room table and talking. Much of what we talked about were our collective memories, especially as we got older. And when we get together, that's what we still tend to do. My wife of 40 years has heard our stories…
More often than not in our culture, when someone is talking about "success" we assume they are referring to either material wealth or the result of someone having achieved some sort of victory or prize. And often they are. Most of us are less superficial in how we define our own successes. Oh, we'll take the cash and the laurels, but our drive to success tends to be motivated by more personally…
When the two boys played alone, they tended toward the art table where they would chatter their way through works of art that involved action -- superheroes mostly. Or maybe they would claim a corner of the rug where they built a fort or parking garage together. When they played this way, it was as equals, almost in the spirit of improvisational comedy, building their play one "Yes, and . . ." at…
An early childhood educator recently told me that if "playwork" was a viable career option in the US, she would have pursued that rather than "play-based preschool teacher." I get it. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to work with and alongside several highly regarded playworkers in the US, Europe, and Australia. I've always felt a strong affinity for their way of working with children, far…