Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality. -Helen Beatrix Potter
Paley: How Children Teach Each Other
Children are able to teach one another best if they are permitted to interact socially and playfully throughout the day. -Vivian Gussin Paley, from The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: the Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom
Holt: What Schools Should Be
Schools should be a place where children learn what they most want to know, instead of what we think they ought to know. The child who wants to know something remembers it and uses it once he has it; the child who learns something to please or appease someone else forgets it when the need […]
Sleeping Outside the Box: A Follow Up
Since writing my posts about our move to a family bed, I’ve gotten a lot of questions. Because we made the shift in our thinking gradually, each step that moved us closer to this decision seemed easy and natural. But looking at it from a more traditional perspective, it can seem quite radical (which is […]
Kohn: Teachable Moments
…there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong. One is to impose a punitive consequence. Another is to see the situation as a “teachable moment”, an opportunity to educate or to solve a problem together. The response here is not, “You’ve misbehaved; now here’s what I’m going […]