Five-year-old children need play, not pressure. Then, at six and seven, they need learning infused with joy, wonder, movement, colors, music, and satisfying work that makes real things. Adults who learned this way thrive. They are in no way behind those who faced pressure. So, why? Why do governments (this is not the teachers’ idea) pressure little children to…
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Originally posted on Growing Children:
The frozen earth is a fertile zone for the gardener’s active mind. Seed catalogs, plot plans, old planting records and books about organic pest control and landscape design are the tools of dreamers who see beyond the white blanket hiding last year’s garden stubble and the remaining leeks. If you are a parent or a…
Digging through the trash barrel, item by item by porch light, searching for the missing leg, I realized that a miserable, crying child can motivate a parent to do almost anything. A leg had had broken off my daughter Nora’s little figurine, a toy policeman carried from a foreign land by a big brother for the little sister who was…
here So many of our readers at Growing Children found us through this post about growing food year round in a School Sunhouse. We are now sharing a diary of our daily work over on Twitter. Please follow us at School Sunhouse to learn how children can grow organic food year round in unheated sunhouses. For schools in cool or cold…
A Gift of Wonder, my book about my six year journey as a new teacher with my first class at The Waldorf School of Cape Cod is now available. The book is centered in classroom experience in a school where teachers stay with the same group of children for up to eight years. A Gift of Wonder reveals a secret…
Have you noticed that many parenting blogs have embraced the mission of encouraging parents to let their children take more risks? I once lived in a culture where trusted, adventurous, children were commonplace. This was the United States in the 1950’s. Here, as a child, I climbed tall trees, sailed across the bay with my younger brothers and traipsed through…
A TEACHER’S ADVICE TO PARENTS IN ONE SHORT LIST According to studies and parents themselves, parenting can make you tired, overwhelmed and anxious. And no wonder. The parent zone includes marinara drizzled onto your new beige carpet, more hours in the car than in your bed and entire mountain ranges of laundry. Plus you are responsible for the health and…
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