Early Childhood Education is a passion with me. Sometimes I think my passion is a means to set the story straight. As a very neglected and brutally abused child, I want to reorder the world. Sometimes I think my passion is more related to "seeing all they can do."
As an early childhood educator, my experience with teaching the youngest class teaches me that the more you offer a child, the more intellectual gas you put into his tank. And that doesn't only apply to the brightest and the strongest. It applies to all the children.
Offer a child ten minutes a day of story or art, and you get a child mildly interested in stories and art. Offer a child an hour of wild and crazy art with colors and textures and you may help develop an artist. Offer a child a foreign language, and he may discover the world of linguistics. A real experience with theatre and acting and the sky is the limit.
Children gain their love of real work from doing real work at school and having the right person tell them they are wonderful. Not every child will be thrilled with every subject, but every child needs every subject to discover what does thrill him and what makes him excel as a whole person.
Offering children new intellectual experiences at three, four, five, six, and into grammar school is what every early childhood place should be doing. The nice thing about the years before grammar school is that the freedom of the hours lends a creative approach to framing in time so that there are many things all day every day.
Fitting everything in is the hard part. And some things are better every day like foreign language. Children need to hear the new language spoken as often as possible, and they need to learn expressions that they can learn and say. Once a week is not enough time spent if you want children to really learn to experience a new language and understand what language means.
Theatre, on the other hand, is one of those things that is very consuming all at one time. To do theatre every day would be exhausting. But there should come a time when a school is working on a play, and all the kids are involved from morning to night for several weeks in a row. It's a good way of teaching "plan, do and review" as a life lesson, as a means of understanding organizational skills.
Then there are the other subjects like science. Science is a constant "work in progress" or something that curiously invades our lives every day, but something we don't often take the time to look up or do anything about. So science class should be a meeting place where we discuss all those neet things we saw this week and need to share. It's also a time to be introduced to new natural ideas.
Then there is music. Music is a more than once a day thing. Music is like praying twice! It's the song of our hearts being creative with our world. Kids need to sing every day, they need to play music with their hands and understand music in their minds. Listening, playing, singing, dancing, and the sound of poetry are all parts of music that need to be engaged, and setting aside at least one daily time is essential.
But there are other things that involve learning like culture, like holidays, like weather, like nutrition, like exercise, like friendship, like building and sewing and clay. All these things should have a time planned out by the people who say they love your child.
A good early childhood program should be inventive and creative and wide open for every possible experience because children need this. Parents need to treasure all their children do.
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