As
an educator, my ultimate goal is to develop independent
learners; children who are self-motivated and responsible for their own
learning. To do this, I need to first instill
the joy and excitement of learning in each child. By partnering with
the parents of each child, we can all maximize our efforts.
We
must make sure that what we teach children is, first of all,
developmentally appropriate. Although we (or the school system) may
have ideas of what we would like a child to accomplish, if he is not
developmentally ready for it, it's simply not going to happen. We need
to have reasonable expectations.
We must make sure that what we are trying to teach is
relevant and interesting to the children.
Talking to my students about a warm summer rain is pretty difficult
because in Northern California, it doesn't rain in the summer. All of our rain is from about November to
March, so it is cool. Some of the
students find it interesting to think about a warm rain, but discussions about
puddle-hopping aren't really relevant.
Similarly, we've all met the 4 or 5-year-old child that can tell you
everything you ever wanted to know about dinosaurs. That's because that child has a passion for
dinosaurs; he or she WANTS to learn everything about them. When children have choices about what they learn,
they are much more engaged and start to learn that ever-important lesson of
taking ownership of their own learning.
Children are active (in case you hadn't noticed!). Providing them with opportunities for active
learning will be much more successful than expecting them to sit back and
simply observe what you are teaching them.
Children are also inquisitive by nature, so encouraging them to develop
their own ideas, experiment, and even take some "safe" risks will
help them to learn to step outside of their comfort zones.
The environment that we create is also very important in
instilling the joy of learning in a child.
The physical environment must be safe, so that a child can take those
risks. It must also be appealing so that
the child will want to be there and will be intrigued by the materials that we
provide. Finally, the
environment we establish must be emotionally safe, where the child feels safe
to explore interests, work with friends, and branch out to try new things.
Misty
Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
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