Everyone needs to have a feeling of belonging. We belong to our families and then to our community.

At Children’s Country House one of our goals is to foster a sense of community. One way we try to do that is to have get-togethers. It fosters a wonderful feeling of family and is gives us a chance to get to know one another a little better. When the children help cook the Thanksgiving luncheon they learn from the experience how much time, effort and planning it takes to make an community or family event happen.

An important aspect of community is getting to know one another better. The teachers are always getting to know the children. We make an effort to have conversations and in which we just listen. Children have wonderful things to say and it is fun to listen to their ideas even when they are fanciful.

It is always amazing to me when some one publishes statistics showing how little time we spend listening to each other. There are always so many things to do that conversation falls by the wayside. Everybody has a need to be known including children. It is important to listen to them. Community is developed and improved when we listen to one another.

Another aspect of community is learning to get along. When children are part of a classroom they have an opportunity to learn to respect the rights of others. They learn that they need to take turns and to respect the rights of their classmates. We often talk with the children about how they want to be respected and therefore must learn to respect others. That’s the way everyone can have a good time.

Our Christmas party is a great example of our families coming together to support their children. There is something magical for me when there are a lot of people together having a good time.

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Happiness is as warm puppy, that phrase captures our imagination. Puppies do generate good feelings. But happiness needs to be more than fleeting moments of cuteness. It needs to be at the core of a person. So that a person has a positive outlook on life and feels that success is assured with effort and diligence.

These positive feelings can start with a young child. Children can feel positive about choices they are allowed to make. When given the opportunity to choose between good choices, children come to feel they can make good choices, and being allowed to choose gives the a feeling of freedom.

How does choosing bring happiness? Just imagine how you would feel if you could not choose the food you eat, the place you live, your friends, your activities. It would be a bleak existence.

Many children lead this kind of existence. Someone is always making all this choices for them. In school the teacher chooses the book, the project, the schedule of the activities. But they will be missing out on happiness. Happiness is making your own choices.

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Should children be exposed to any violence in literature? It was suggested to me that it is inappropriate for children to experience any kind of violence in books. Excepting graphic and gratuitous violence as unacceptable at any age, classic tales do contain violent elements at time which lend to the story. When there are witches and villains they do need to be slain.

I had always thought that classic tales contained this element of good triumphing over evil as an empowerment for children. It says that you can fight evil and win. In life it is unfortunately not always so easy to know the evil or to subdue it. But life is filled with good and bad. It is unrealistic to not let children in on this secret which they probably have figured out by the age of four at any rate.

Do we ban the Jabberwocky with its brilliant language? It suggests that it is run through and through even though we don’t really know what it is. Even though the poem makes no sense Alice says it makes her have thoughts, even though she doesn’t know what they are. Wouldn’t it better to have a thought than have all your thinking done by someone else.

Most of the tension in good literature is between good and evil. That seems to be the tension of life choosing the good over the evil. The ten commandments have dominated our thoughts and cultures with a set of laws that tells us what is good and what is not.
The best teaching of young children is to help them have thoughts. We give them language so they can think about things. We give them experiences so they can think about things. And in the final analysis thinking is of more value than rote learning.

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Because of all the recent news coverage, everyone’s awareness is heightened about global warming. Many of us understand that we all need to participate in whatever ways we can to help the environment.

I named my preschool Children’s COUNTRY House. Why? I have ALWAYS felt, from the very first time I thought about creating a preschool/daycare center, that it needed to have a component that connected the children to nature and the earth. Especially in industrialized countries we have been neglectful of our environment, and I think that part of the reason is because we are no longer tied to land in the way people once were. For a superb discussion of this issue, I recommend reading “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv.

Too often there is hardly any green and growing spaces around us to give us a feeling or sense that we are intricately bound to our environment. And now with global warming reports on the news nearly every night and much of the country experiencing serious droughts, we are developing a heightened awareness about all things environmental.

Children can and must become involved in the nature that is around them and be taught, for example, to conserve energy and utilities by watching the behavior of the adults in their lives, including teachers. Even though children cannot think abstractly in the early preschool years, they can be taught to value the cycle of nature.

I have always believed, as a major part of my educational philosophy, that if you want children to be ecologically aware, in their earliest years they must learn to appreciate nature and experience and be taught that their lives are part of a larger whole.

At Children’s Country House we have been fortunate enough to have nearly an acre of land surrounding the school. Squirrels, birds, butterflies and insects make their homes in the nearly twenty-five trees. It gives the teachers the perfect opportunity to explain to children how one form of life such as the vegetation makes existence possible for other forms of life. Our trees and grass provide food, protection, and space for other animals to live. When we teach children to about these creatures right there in their school, we teach respect for all living things.

Another way we help children understand the cycle of life is by planting vegetable and flower gardens. The children help prepare the soil, they plant the seeds, they weed and water and otherwise tend the plants as they grow. In this way, the children can see how plant growth happens and can finally taste the vegetables they have grown harvested straight from their own garden. Our children can experience first hand the need we all have for the earth and environment when they experience this very apparent cycle of growth.

Our school also has some farm animals including a pony, a goat, a rooster and several rabbits. The children help with the care and feeding of the animals. and in this way they learn their habits and what they like to eat. We spend a lot of time enabling them to learn to respect the animals and be kind to them. We l know from the testimony of adults who attended CCH asa preschoolers and who have returned to enroll their own children in our school that they experienceed how animals enriched their early lives with particular traits and characteristics, perhaps even their personalities.

We have applied to kidsgardening.com for a grant, which we hope will increase our ability to, enhance the lives of our students to understand and appreciate their environment. I’ll let you know in a later post whether we are successful with our application or not, and we’ll post some pictures of our children’s involvement with the environment at Children’s Country House.

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Many of the behaviors and attitudes that you want your child to develop are not easily quantifiable. The real Einstein put it this way. “Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.” One such behavior is imaginative creativity. It is not so much that your child has to learn creativity, as that they need the opportunity to develop and use their inborn curiosity and imagination.

Creativity is the bedrock of intelligence. No scientist, artist, writer, educator, doctor can ply their profession without the use of imagination. Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” and “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Imagination also makes possible any progress in society. Without imagining something new, there is no way to invent or create it. And yet how do you measure this ability in a child?

More importantly than measuring creativity or imaginationit is how you create it or rather how can you allow yourf child to develop their own imagination and creative responses? One of the most productive ways is to have an enriched, creative environment that is filled with many open-ended questions and possible answers and possibilities.

Art projects allow a child to explore color, fluidity, texture and shape. A child must be allowed to use his or her imagination and be given the opportunity to use a variety of media. A broad selection of toys allows children to form patterns and playing with numbers, letters, shapes and colors will assist with this develpoment as well. Blocks can become castles or forts or houses or roads or whatever the child can imagine.

A yard that provides different textures of sand, dirt, and grass gives a child a place to dig, to discover bugs or worms and a yard can provide endless opportunities to create roads, bridges, tunnels and canals. Add a little water and you have mud pies and many other “delicious” cakes and pies. Include trees in the yard and it becomes a forest in which birds and squirrels chatter above.

Any child given all these kinds of activities will enjoy and profit from a wonderful day filled with adventure and fun. A child in this situation learns that there are many different answers to a question or different solutions to a problem. Your child will learn that his or her the thoughts can be developed and become into actualities.

You child’s bright inquisitive nature will be certain evidence that this important type of learning is taking place. When you find your child to be unafraid to ask questions or to try something new you will have a certain indication that he or she is developing a creative and imaginative mind.

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Parent’s want to raise bright and intelligent children. So often both parents are working and dealing with the resulting busy schedules. It’s no wonder parents are tempted to seek out and turn t turned to “quick” fixes like the Baby Einstein tapes, etc. But the problem that remains with such a tempting time saving solution is that we know children learn best when they are actively involved with their environment. How does a passive activity like watching a video that provide for this essential developmental requirement.

I am constantly confronted by parents asking, Wouldn’t my two to five-year-old child “learn” more if they were in a school “classroom” environment? A teacher certainly can impart knowledge of the ABC’s. Children will absorb that kind of knowledge, and it’s certainly true that children can practice writing letters and numbers they’ve learned in such lessons.

But don’t jump on the “classroom instruction” band wagon quite so quickly. I can’t tell you many times proud parents have told me that their children know the alphabet and numbers and that we should therefore really treat their children as if they are very much advanced in their development. But then while pointing to a letter I ask the child, “What is this letter?” far too often the child replies” I don’t know.” When I’ve held up two fingers and asked “How many fingers am I holding up?” the child will answer, “I don’t know.”

A child’s ability to recite letters and numbers is not an indication that the child knows and understands the meaning of the letters and numbers they can recite. In order to read a child has to recognize not only the the letters but the sounds they make and how those symbols and sounds can be made into the groups of letters from which words are formed.

Remember, letters are shapes. Therefore, a thorough understanding of and the ability to recognize shapes is an extremely important prerequisite to learning letters and numbers. Blocks, parquetry, and puzzles are the sorts of manipulative materials that provide children in active participation with shapes help children. These physical activities provide children with active, multi-sensory learning experiences. It’s the same principal as an adult learning dance steps by actually dancing than by watching someone on TV dancing. There is no substitute for being in the game.

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All parents want to have bright children. I know that’s true, because as a parent of tow daughters and the grandmother of three grandsons, I know I did. On my bookshelf are books with tiles like “How to Raise a Brighter Child” and the like. Thus when a series of tapes entitled “Baby Einstein” is advertised in parenting and magazines and on television, it seems like a good way to insure the success of your child with a very little effort.

The books I read years ago never offered such an easy answer. Perhaps parents had more time than they do today. The books suggested that a child’s developmental progress would come from toys that promoted thinking skills, from activities that enabled physical development, from interactions with other children that provided social development, and also from the time a parent spent with their children helping them think through problems.

I have a poster in my home office with a quote from Einstein. It says “I am not all that intelligent, I am just extremely inquisitive.” Being inquisitive is happens naturally in children, except when they are involved in sedentary activities. If children are not engaged with their environment their questions about it simply don’t occur. Children ask questions when they are involved. They want to know the whys and hows, and even though it sometimes feels as if the questions are seemingly endless, but that’s because the world in which they live is intricate.

The path to a brighter child requires an enriched environment in which children can ask questions and become involved in the opportunity of working out the answers. Don’t rob your children of that opportunity by sticking them in front of a computer or TV screen for hours.

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Preschool educators have known for a long time that young children 0-5 need to have concrete learning experiences, so it comes as no surprise when researchers say that infants and toddlers derive little benefit from watching videos such as “Baby Einstein”.

Children need to have hands on experiences in their early learning years. They use all their senses to learn when they investigate an object or toy, and during that investigation they actually learn about attributes like shape, texture, density, smell and function while they’re “playing”.

Children are involved in millions of such interactions with their environment when they play, all of which create the millions of connections in their brains that inform them about the properties of the world in which they live. This sort of learning simply does not occur when a child is “involved”in the sedentary act of watching a video. The problem is that they are, in fact , not involved.

I have spent the last thirty plus years at Children’s Country House building an environment rich in sensory stimulation. There is a yard with sand, dirt and grass, and animals with fur and feathers. We provide trays filled with water, rice or even flour. Our classrooms are filled with a myriad of games, puzzles and blocks to manipulate. Everyday we provide a different assortment of experiences that will give the children the sound experiential basis for developing their intelligence.

I can say without hesitation that our Children’s Country House environment has helped develop children’s minds and bodies.Recently it has been such a pleasure to have parents who began their educational experience at Children’s Country House at ages 2 through 5 bring their own children to our school so they can have the same solid beginning as learners that thier parents had.

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