July Book Club-The Importance of Being Little
Happy August! I must start by apologizing for this late post. We are already over a week into August and I am just now posting about our July Book Club book! During the month of July, I took on the role of project manager for our home remodel, it was way more time consuming than I expected. Now with the project well underway I have a bit of a better handle on it and you should be hearing from me more frequently.
In July, I selected The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups by Erika Christakis. This book was a timely choice given our current Global health crisis. Christakis takes a deep dive into the United States Early Learning system and how the US approaches young children. As we begin the 2020-2021 school year, many children will be starting their year remotely and learning virtually. Christakis’ book makes you rethink early education as it currently exists. What are we asking of our youngest learners and why? Is what they are learning relevant? Meaningful? Or important?
Her book covers a large range of topics in early education including teaching to state standards, social-emotional learning, un-creative art projects, letter of the week, lack of free play, materialism, technology, and over-diagnosis/labeling of young children. She aligns her ideas and thoughts to many well-respected educational theorists including Piaget, Vygotsky, and Erickson. Throughout the book her overarching theme is, giving children time, space, and materials to explore and be children. Her advice for adults is to focus on building deep relationships with children.
Her book left me with many thoughts especially as I approached teaching my own children this coming year.
Here are a few highlights:
“The changes in early education are well documented but bear repeating: some teachers are spending almost one hundred hours per year administering tests to kindergarteners, and music, art, recess and free play have disappeared from some kindergarten classrooms.”
“The real question behind the standards movement is, as I’ve argued whether or not the standards measure the things we care about.” Are the things we are expecting our children to learn things that are important?
“Finland’s guiding principles for early childhood education and care (ECEC) offer a template for what this kind of active participation in the world might look like for a child: In ECEC it is important to underline the intrinsic value of childhood, to foster childhood, to hep the child develop as a human being ECEC activities are guided by broad educational goals that go beyond any specific and curricular targets.”
“Parents need to think about how to prepare the environment for children in order to take full advantage of children’s natural learning power. Parents need to think of themselves as solar panels or wind farms, pieces of passive but highly effective infrastructure standing at the ready for those sunny or windy days when natural energy can be channeled.”
“Remind our children everyone has struggles to work on when they play. Some kids are shy. Some have trouble controlling their bodies. Some people are good at rules, but aren’t very friendly. Teach the child to approach play with fresh eyes.”
“Anger is not only a natural by-product of learning (as we see when children become frustrated by difficult tasks) but, more important, an ‘essential energy for learning’ that helps children acquire mastery of skill such as curiosity and persistence.”
“We’ve seen the most essential engine of child development is not gadgetry or testing, but deep human connection.”
“Young children are important because they contain within themselves the ingredients for learning, in any place and at any time. Parents and teachers are important, too and that’s because they still control the one early learning environment that trumps all others: the relationship with the growing child.”
What the next year will look like is uncertain for many of us, but one thing we all can control is building strong and meaningful connections with our children.