Teaching With The Body In Mind

A conversation about finding balance in your family schedule. How can families support young children's (and everyone's) need for routine and predictability when much of the structure of our lives has been disrupted?  In early childhood classrooms, daily schedules provide routines and add a little certainty to the day.  Yet schedules also need to be flexible and leave room for serendipity. 

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The group shares ideas for how families can support children's need to move while cooped up at home.  What house rules might need to be suspended?  What  creative ways can we find to repurpose spaces and materials? How can we support children's growing ability and desire to be helpful and feel competent?

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We'd all like a little help sometimes so why do we tell children, "I'm not going to help you because I know you can do it yourself?" How do we balance supporting children's sense of autonomy and assuring them that someone is going to take care of them? Perhaps we should distinguish between solving problems for children and solving problems with them. 

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Ross has been thinking about adults' responses to speed and the duality of how we tell children "hurry, hurry" one minute and "slow down" the next.  Are we reflecting on why and when we correct children for their rate of speed? Tom worries that we want children to learn things faster and faster.  Mike points out that one of the drawbacks of group care is that it is not set up to meet the needs of outliers within the community. Joey wonders how we can actually help children when there are times that things need to go faster.  We all agree that everyone should have a chance to enjoy the gift of slowing down sometimes.

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Mike is excited to share what he's been learning from textbooks as he thinks about our approach to motor development in young children.  In developing a motor skill, motivation is step one!  Many adults are missing the mark when expecting children to be ready to implement a skill in which they have little interest or that they haven't had time to explore.

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Joey wants to talk about how children use their bodies to support symbolic thinking as they create their worlds through play. Early childhood classrooms are full of crawling cats, roaring dragons, and zooming race cars.  How does children's play change as they move from concrete to abstract thinking?  Why does the need for embodiment go away?

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Mike wants to take a closer look at the distinction between gross motor and fine motor skills.  Can they be considered in isolation or are they intertwined?  Are fine motor skills given preferential treatment in our educational system while we overlook gross motor skills?  Is there "push down" of expectations for fine motor skills? Do well-developed large motor skills correlate to well-developed small motor skills?

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Part 2 of the conversation with Lisa Murphy touches on: teaching from a place of fear vs. confidence, the benefits of self-awareness for practitioners, the need for control (of children and of our own feelings), coming from a strength-based vs. deficit perspective, and the differences in approach between long-term mentoring and one-stop presentations.

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Lisa Murphy joins the group for a conversation centered around the ideas in her new book, "Lisa Murphy on Being Child Centered."  Does our teaching practice match our stated values? If you pause to ask reflective questions, will you discover a disconnect between values and practice? How do we discern the difference between control and structure?  Can ironing with children be a form of play? 

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