Bridge between School and Home

Hello, friends!  It is September and school has begun again.  The children are full of joy to be back into the simple warm rhythms; enfolded by this rhythmic flow, they grow more fully into themselves.  Here is what one parent wrote me about the bridge her child has built between home and school:

“The school day doesn’t just stop when the day is over. Greer plays school whenever she is at home as well. At home she gets the chance to be the teacher. She sets up our living room like the living room at The Rose Garden. Moving the coffee table and couches so that the space is just right. She brings in her own chair along with a cup of tea and some crackers. She sets her babies up in a semi circle around her so everyone can see and then she begins to “read” her story always starting with the chime of the bell which at our house is the clinging of silverware. She then sips on her tea as she tells her story with a big (all words) book in her lap.

When the time for resting comes up she prepares by laying all the colored silkies around the room and placing each baby it the appropriate place. She covers them says sweet words to them and gives each a gentle rocking motion to help the fall asleep. Once everyone is satisfied she goes to her chair and has a sip of tea.

Watching this take place in my own living room gives me a sense of satisfaction and pure joy. What my husband and I are giving our youngest of three is a treasure that is molding her into the gentle and kind human-being that we had hoped for when we decided to become parents.

Thank you to Sharifa and  Rebecca for keeping us grounded in what really matters in life. The innocence and love our children bring us everyday.”  Shannon

And thank you, Shannon, for sharing this with us! These rhythms create the foundation for a lifetime.  During the summer, I had the pleasure of talking, on separate occasions, with two of my former students who are now college students.  Each young woman told me how deeply her early years had formed and shaped her.  The years spent in this forest busily building “homes” for insects & feeding the birds as well as singing, painting, playing  and listening intently to stories had given them a deep love for the world, and also a beginning direction in their future work.  One young woman is studying environmental law and she said she paints for pleasure, while the other is a poet as well as environmental activist.

The environment of our home gives shape to the young soul; let us be joyful for this gift, as we go about  our “daily round!”

Feed. Play. Love. Virtual Conference April 5-21

It is spring, here in the Virginia woods.  The forsythia reigns golden above the deck, and the daffodils sway in the dogwood-scented breeze.  The Rose Garden children are gearing up for their “summer-games”  Today they found catkins which had fallen from the trees to the ground, and quickly made fairy houses in which to leave presents of “the little ears of corn” for the fairies!  These children are so full of imaginative forces and pure creativity!  If only every parent could understand that this life-imbued imagination is the foundation for a life of thought, filled with creativity and flexibility.  The world of the future (and the future is now!) will need people who have thinking that is flexible enough to move creatively with change, people familiar with “flow”.  These capacities begin to grow in early childhood.  Let’s nurture them for the future!

Tomorrow  will begin an amazing( and free)  virtual conference:  Feed. Play. Love.  It is designed for mothers, to empower you to choose, consciously, how you will parent and educate your children.  I will be speaking on the necessity of creative play to foster this wide, up-welling creativity that they will need for the future.  To find  more information,  to see the other fine speakers and contributors, and to participate, follow this link

http://thewaldorfconnection.com/dap/a/?a=51&p=www.fplsummit.com/

Here is a little from the web-site:

Our incredible speakers are going to teach you so much about being a parent on purpose…

We’ll teach you to FEED your child’s body, mind and spirit…

Give ways to allow them space to PLAY and foster their own ingenuity and creativity…

Inspire ways to LOVE being a Mom, to feel confident and purposeful in the choices that you make about raising your child.

You will also receive the 2011 Feed. Play. Love. Workbook so that you have a tool to implement the strategies, techniques and ideas that you want to incorporate into your life.

Click here and see what good things are in store for you! 

http://thewaldorfconnection.com/dap/a/?a=51&p=www.fplsummit.com/

The Rich Abundance of Simplicity

It had rained in the night, and the playground was wet yesterday morning.  I had kept bags of raked leaves from the fall, for this exact sort of moment.  I emptied a bag, so the children and I could rake a path of leaves from the gate to the door.  When I emptied  the other bags of sweet and fragrant leaves to be spread into their play-space, the children greeted this addition like I had given them mounds of gold!  They rushed for the rakes; they worked and played, laughing and jumping, raking and tumbling until they dropped, exhausted and giggly in Rebecca’s and my arms! 

Indoors today, a royal gathering was held.  Kings and Queens gathered to plan the affairs of state, and to share a banquet feast.

When we adults can give ourselves so fully to the joy of the moment, we will have become rich in our simplicity!

Re-Thinking Childhood: Parenting and Educating Children in a Time of Global Transformation

In agricultural societies, winter is the time to think-through and plan for the future.  Decisions regarding which crops to continue, which fields to allow to remain fallow, and new seeds to experiment with are at the forefront of farmer’s minds.  Today, as I watch the snowfall just  outside my window, I also am thinking of seeds for the future.  I am pleased to invite you to join me and others who contemplate our best future, to the March 4 -6, 2011 conference Re-Thinking Childhood: Parenting and Educating Children in a Time of Global Transformation hosted by Great Lakes Teacher Training, Milwaukee, WI.

Joan Almon, Executive Director of The Alliance for Childhood and I will keynote the conference.  We will work with a host of workshop presenters who will offer topics for educators, parents, community leaders and all forward thinking people.   This is from the brochure:

“Our world has been changing rapidly. We see transformation on a global scale in the fields of technology and science, in our natural environment and farms, in the economy and politics. It’s hard to even imagine the future our children will be entering into as adults. How can we best prepare them for the unknown? What experiences do they need to grow into adults who know themselves and have a sense of purpose? Can we imagine forms of education and childcare that support the development of meaningful relationships as a foundation for new and better ways of life”

Please follow this link, to visit and consider joining us for this important conference. Together we envision the future!    www.waldorftraining.com/marchconf120610.htm

On a final note, here is a thought from one of my up-coming presentations:

Those of us who are committed to the future ask ourselves a critically important question: “What is the best thing I can do, for the children?” But I would propose that we consider another equally critical question: “Who is the best person I can be, for the children?” How can I become my very best self? Who we are is the subtext our children read while we live each day with them, as we go about our “doing.”

It is our consciousness, knowing who we are, that shapes our children and the future as well. Raising and educating our children to know themselves prepares them best for whatever the future may hold. For it is in knowing ourselves, that we hold the compass which guides our actions. When we know who we are, we will know what to do.

“Green Space” and Winter Games

Virginia has had a very cold winter so far:  many, many days the temperature is below freezing, and plenty of days in the 20’s.  This has not phased The Rose Garden children, as we play in the woods!  As Helle Heckman says:  “There is no such thing as bad weather, there is only bad clothing!”   Equipped with woolie long johns, plenty of layers, snow suits even with no snow, and snug hats and mittens, the children have flourished in the cold.  “But why,” you ask, “send them out in such weather?”  It is hard to convey the importance of Nature, in the development of young children.

I wrote an article that was recently published in the Winter edition of Rhythm of The Home (click on Connections) a beautiful on-line magazine that you will want to visit.  These are beginning thoughts on outdoor play:   ” Outdoor play offers the child the opportunity to step into the long slow rhythms of the earth. The child readily comes to know their own bodied-ness when in intimate connection to the body of the earth. Running, swinging, jumping, creeping, sliding, kneeling, splashing, digging…all of this develops familiarity with and fullness “in the body.” The child develops strength, balance, agility, grace, flexibility, competence and confidence. This kind of “body-knowing” lays a foundation for all of these qualities to permeate the child’s whole being. Years later, the young person steps into the world with these capacities intact and readily available for the challenges and joys of adult life”

Here is a little more from an article of mine to be published in the Rhythm of the Home spring issue:

“Much research has been done, observing children’s play in both natural spaces, and in “built spaces” Studies show that children engage in more creative play in green areas than in built spaces. One study observed children playing in both “vegetative rooms”, (little forts and such that he children had built themselves) and in playgrounds dominated by play structures. They observed that children playing on the formal play structures grouped themselves in hierarchical subsets, dependent upon physical abilities. Whereas the children playing in the natural vegetative rooms used more fantasy play and their social standing was based more on language skills, creativity and inventiveness”.

Language skills, creativity and inventiveness abound when children are given plenty of creative play time;  time to run and frolic held in the arms of our Mother, the Earth!

Winter Fun!

Winter has arrived on The Rose Garden playground and the children are ready to play!  But what you see here is not all fun and games: according to a CNN article yesterday, the learning that takes place in childhood through the magic of creative play serves them not only on the playground, but in their Harvard classrooms.  The following article by Erika and Nicholas Kristakis, of Harvard, highlights how the ability to control impulses, which is learned in  play, serves the young adult in their future endeavors.  The operant words in the article are “constructive, teacher (adult) moderated play”.  Children certainly learn from their interactions with each other, but they need an adult close by to help them know how to move through the rough spots.  Here is an excerpt from the article; you’ll see your child’s play in a new light!

“One of the best predictors of school success is the ability to control impulses. Children who can control their impulse to be the center of the universe, and — relatedly — who can assume the perspective of another person, are better equipped to learn.

Psychologists calls this the “theory of mind”: the ability to recognize that our own ideas, beliefs, and desires are distinct from those of the people around us. When a four-year-old destroys someone’s carefully constructed block castle or a 20-year-old belligerently monopolizes the class discussion on a routine basis, we might conclude that they are unaware of the feelings of the people around them.

The beauty of a play-based curriculum is that very young children can routinely observe and learn from others’ emotions and experiences. Skills-based curricula, on the other hand, are sometimes derisively known as “drill and kill” programs because most teachers understand that young children can’t learn meaningfully in the social isolation required for such an approach.

How do these approaches look different in a classroom? Preschoolers in both kinds of programs might learn about hibernating squirrels, for example, but in the skills-based program, the child could be asked to fill out a worksheet, counting (or guessing) the number of nuts in a basket and coloring the squirrel’s fur.

In a play-based curriculum, by contrast, a child might hear stories about squirrels and be asked why a squirrel accumulates nuts or has fur. The child might then collaborate with peers in the construction of a squirrel habitat, learning not only about number sense, measurement, and other principles needed for engineering, but also about how to listen to, and express, ideas.

The child filling out the worksheet is engaged in a more one-dimensional task, but the child in the play-based program interacts meaningfully with peers, materials, and ideas.

Programs centered around constructive, teacher-moderated play are very effective. For instance, one randomized, controlled trial had 4- and 5-year-olds engage in make-believe play with adults and found substantial and durable gains in the ability of children to show self-control and to delay gratification. Countless other studies support the association between dramatic play and self-regulation.

Through play, children learn to take turns, delay gratification, negotiate conflicts, solve problems, share goals, acquire flexibility, and live with disappointment. By allowing children to imagine walking in another person’s shoes, imaginative play also seeds the development of empathy, a key ingredient for intellectual and social-emotional success.

The real “readiness” skills that make for an academically successful kindergartener or college student have as much to do with emotional intelligence as they do with academic preparation. Kindergartners need to know not just sight words and lower case letters, but how to search for meaning. The same is true of 18-year-olds.

As admissions officers at selective colleges like to say, an entire freshman class could be filled with students with perfect grades and test scores. But academic achievement in college requires readiness skills that transcend mere book learning. It requires the ability to engage actively with people and ideas. In short, it requires a deep connection with the world.

For a five year-old, this connection begins and ends with the creating, questioning, imitating, dreaming, and sharing that characterize play. When we deny young children play, we are denying them the right to understand the world. By the time they get to college, we will have denied them the opportunity to fix the world too.”

The Lantern Walk is Coming!

Autumn is a time to turn around and survey the work of the year.  A time to assess what has developed, before we make plans for what is to come.  In doing this, I looked back to my first post on this blog, and here is what I found.  At the exact moment we begin preparing for the Lantern Walk this year!

“All week long the children had been watching Rebecca and me make paper lanterns of their watercolor paintings, folding and cutting the stars so perfectly, gluing and stapling, attaching the wire handles, filling each one with a candle. Such anticipation….the Lantern Walk!

Finally in the gathering dark, each little lantern was lit, their cut out stars shone bravely and the warmth of their red and gold glow gave us good cheer as we walked the woodland path. Rustling through the fallen leaves, singing through the woods, happily we trudged up and ever up the forested hillside. Round we looped, until at my long driveway’s end, the children had a thrill: if their parents agreed, they might hand the lantern to the adult, then run like the wind through the dark, all the way to the playground gate!

Like the children, we can work, in our adult life, to create a sturdy container, then carry our light into a dark world. We can follow the thread laid out by our own heart, illumined by the heart’s light, regardless of the twisting path or depth of darkness. In the end, we run on light feet, we run toward Home! This is an image to live with, to give our children, an image to begin a new journey together.”

Anything Can Be Anything!

Here is a quote from Heaven on Earth’s chapter about creative play:

In thinking of the young child’s free creative play materials, a fitting motto we can keep in mind is, “Anything can be anything.” But what does that mean? Children need play materials that are open-ended enough to meet new needs each day, to fill the demands of their imagination. A toy needs to be “unformed” enough to be reasonably used as many things, in many circumstances. For instance, a red fire truck, with a remote control, will always be destined to be just that. But a simple, open-bed wooden truck can be a fire truck, a farm vehicle, a bus, a lumber wagon, or even a truck that floats on water! Or, better yet, an open basket can be a bed, a suitcase, a grocery bag, a hat, or, when turned upside down, a mountain, a prison, a cave, a hiding place ?.?.?. anything can be anything!

Yesterday on The Rose Garden playground we were surprised and delighted by this principle in-action.  Sitting on the tree stumps was a small group of musicians, busy singing, tapping their feet and strumming banjos, mandolins and guitars.  In the corner, the old wooden ladder had been laid down to become a rocket ship.  Comfortable reclining chairs for the space-explorers were under construction.  Beside the porch, a group of mothers attended their babies, giving them baths in the large bucket.  Occasionally we were asked to baby-sit the fresh-scrubbed babies so grocery shopping could be done.  What is the magic, what is the common thread here?  Banjos, mandolins, guitars, as well as comfy chairs for the rocket ship and even the darling babies themselves, all of these remarkably different playthings were….the playground boards!   The absolute wonder, the vast breadth of the young child’s imagination lies waiting for us to allow enough time and enough open-ended “toys” for it to blossom.   Toys:  sticks, pine cones, boards, bricks, lawn-mower tires, rope, pieces of slate, bales of hay, un-baled hay, piles of leaves….you get the idea!

Amazing…

Today the children came indoors to have their snack of buckwheat (ask me for the recipe) and then proceeded to play utterly independently and engaged, needing no help, inspiration or guidance from Rebecca and me. We sat in amazed awe at these very young children whose imaginations soared, whose social skills greased the engines of Play, and whose movement was orchestrated like a bee-hive! The sound of children engaged in “deep Play” is a particular music, perhaps like the reverberations of the Universe at work…Pure Grace!

Let’s take a moment to think about our children’s hands….

I wrote this in a summer journal as I watched the children modeling natural clay, with total absorption, at the stream bank:

“I see their hands move lively and quick. Unconsciously they live the gift of an opposable thumb. Today I am thinking of our ancestors, all the way back to the cave, and the central place of the hand. In every culture, until perhaps the last forty years, hand-education has been an integral part of growing up. Hands were taught to carve stone arrowheads, to weave baskets, to mold clay pots, to hunt, to cure, to cook, to spin and weave, to sow and harvest. What are hands taught in the twenty-first century? At what expense do their hands lie limp in their laps? As their hands languish unused, so follow their minds. How can we measure the impact of a well-coordinated, steady, finely-tuned hand? What riches does this hand bring into their life? What do these well-trained hands have to offer the world?”

In his book The Hand: How It Shapes the Brain, Language, and Culture, neurologist Frank Wilson shows us the pivotal place of the human hand, equipped with our amazing thumb, in the evolution of the species. He argues passionately for the education of the hand, assuring us that people who use their hands, woodworkers, artists and plumbers alike, have a way of knowing the world that is inaccessible to those who have less hand training. We know that the density of nerve endings in our fingertips is enormous, and when these are engaged in childhood, the brain is enriched beyond measure. Through artistic expression, through free creative play, through engagement with the natural world the hand, and therefore the mind, is introduced to its own astonishing creative potential.