The Garden School Tattler

Miss Jana, Miss Kelly and Miss Judy all went to the Early Childhood workshop out at USI this morning. Jana picked me up at 6:30. It was time very well spent. We saw a lot of old friends including the keynote speaker, Mary Jo Huff.

Mary Jo is an international story teller and an old and dear friend. She can carry an audience for hours and people just love her. She uses a lot of puppets and encourages other teachers to do the same thing. It's obvious why. Puppets, props and "look at mes" are things that motivate children to listen simply because they draw the attention, draw the interest of the child for some silly or some purposeful reason, and therefore the children learn. Children won't learn unless they listen, and passive listening is one of the nightmares of our time, so consequently the right teacher approach is to "get 'em to listen."

We bought some peepers. I'm sure the kids will report about the peepers.

I'm posting Mary Jo's website under "Fun places to be." I hope readers will visit her site.

The other classes at the workshop were enlightening. We at the Garden School are right on the cutting edge of education. We're batting 1000 and what's new and news is old hat for us. It's a nice trend. We used to be considered "out there" and now everyone is catching up. We're not on a separate planet anymore, and that's nice.

Miss Jana is thinking of teaching science at school. I think it would be a nice addition. I would be the literature teacher and take over that spot. It would be very good for me to do that.

One of the things that was suggested at the workshop was to nix weekly themes. We don't do weekly themes for kids; we do them for teachers as a guideline. With a bee in the bonnet, we are never sure who will run where with what. This coming week we will be exploring Native Americans; who knows where that will lead.

I think it's time for our teachers to begin to give some of those workshops again. We used to do that every year, but fell away from it because we were so far out of sight in what we were doing at the GS. One of the things that they didn't do was nutrition and food. They also had no slot for hyperactivity and for foreign language which we do at school.