The education system forces people to unlearn the empathy they were born with. It’s a system based on always seeming strong, contributing to the economy, and being number one. Being number one is the rule of game, and how we relate to others is fundamentally dismissed.” –Bernard Amadei, Ashoka Fellow and founder of Engineers Without […]
The Hands are the Instruments of Man’s Intelligence – Dr. Maria Montessori When I sit quietly in the corner of a classroom, I find myself focused on my student’s hands – not only because I have been trained that way, but also because it is fascinating. One day, I observed a student using the ‘BambinoLUK’ […]
A birthday celebration puts a smile on our faces and gives us an excuse to be a ‘queen’ or a ‘king’ for the day, enjoying something special at least one day of the year. Many of us even go so far as to mark specific birthdays with explosive party plans. The sweet 16 birthday; the […]
Colour speaks. Its universal language passes overall boundaries of race or nation, understood by everyone to some degree, if not by the head, then by the heart. It speaks to the unlearned no less than the learned. Children understand and respond to it immediately. — Gladys Mayer, The Mystery Wisdom of Colour ********** A long […]
“Today, we are going to play Gradai kha dee-o.” “What is that?” “In English, we say ‘one-legged rabbit. In Japanese, you say ‘hito-ashi Usagi-san.’” The children were very excited, mainly because we had an ‘expert’ friend from Thailand to play with us! Back in the 1990s, I was implementing this multicultural curriculum to create a new […]
“Those who tell the stories rule society.” — Plato I did not grow up with storytelling in my family. I developed storytelling with my love for the theatre, where my mother took me regularly. At eight years old, I would be alone in my basement with my stuffed animal ‘students,’ telling them stories about all […]
When I was about eight years old, I was a colossal fan of Little House on the Prairie. In the one-room schoolhouse that Laura Ingalls attended, she was made to recite really long poems. I was always stunned, and then remembered, ‘it is just television.’ I’m quite sure that’s why my school never made us […]
Do you have a special place you like to go in nature, maybe in your back yard, or a park near hour house? Some of you might already have a sit spot, a special place somewhere in nature that you visit all the time. It’s a place that’s just yours -a place you know better […]
Multiage Classrooms McLoughlin (1967) argued that graded schools had always shared one common flaw, “They attempted to fit the child to the curriculum and never the curriculum to the child.” “How can you possibly teach a group of kids more than one level at a time?” “Will my younger child be learning bad […]