Mittens update, conference letter, article

Dear Families,

We have been using blue stretch mittens for all the children at outside time. Children put on a pair after they have first put on their outside clothes. They may take them off for picking berries. Now that they have used them for a few days, I observe that most children seem content with the mittens; they are light enough that they allow the children to feel their hands enough to, say, use a shovel in the sandbox. When we gather at the ropes course shelter for our snack, children take off their mittens. Kim and I give new pairs of mittens after snack to replace wet mittens. I collect the mittens again right before we gather for the closing circle.

Since the blue mittens seem to work for all the children in the class, I recommend taking other mittens and gloves home, or to have some ready in your car. One of my goals is to avoid having your mittens get lost at school.

Even though I purchased a lot of mittens, it will be important to keep track of them (another way to say this is because I purchased a lot of mittens I have to be extra vigilant or else I may lose them all). Their effectiveness is that they are easy to put on, allow children to retain a sense of touch and dexterity, AND can be replaced when they become wet and hands become cold. If blue mittens come home with your child, please return them. Kim washed particularly sandy mittens with children in the classroom today. It was a harmonious and healthy activity that delighted many children. Because there will sometimes be a wet set of mittens drying on the rack, we need multiple changes for the children, and I expect and hope our class to grow in size to twelve or close to twelve as we proceed in the year. Thank you for your help in keeping track of the mittens.

Children thrive when given the opportunity to participate in meaningful, tangible work--or to play in the presence of such work. Kim and I have been getting the children outside particularly early so that we can move sand from the big pile to the oven shelter for 45 minutes to an hour before taking our walk to our various places in the woods. Today I gave a number of children "sand" rides in the wheelbarrow.

I have filed printed copies and sent electronic copies of a conference preparation letter to families who have signed up by Tuesday. Here is a copy of the letter even if you choose to wait until spring or another time for a conference. Whenever you do come for a conference, it is most helpful if you provide me answers to the question in advance.

Whether you come to a conference next week or not, I encourage you to read this "Open Letter to a Mother of a 'Stuttering' Child." This is an old article. It may not even reflect current research by speech experts. It was given to me by a professor at the University of Maryland when I was training to become a public school nursery or kindergarten teacher; she found it to be one of the most helpful articles she had ever read about the importance of allowing children time to develop before fixing them with a label. As you will read in the article, the author and other researchers found that the most potent cause of stuttering was the diagnosis of stuttering. All children stumble over words and repeat from time to time; it was only once a parent or teacher regarded this normal disfluency as a problem that speech became more difficult.

I find many analogies with my work with children birth to 5. Children do not begin as miniature models of perfect adults (if there were such a thing) but develop in their own way and in their own pace. Some children may learn to ride a bike at 3, others much later. Some will be ready to solve conflicts with the words of Nelson Mandela or Gandhi from toddlerhood; most will use less beautiful forms of physical or verbal force as they learn how to be an individual in a group. Some children will pronounce all consonants at an early age. For some children, it is still normal for some consonants, especially blends, to wait until age 6 or beyond.

I am not advocating we ignore all medical professionals or other experts. There will be children for whom an early intervention provides tremendous benefits. For most children, even children with profound special needs, what we offer in Waldorf early childhood education and home life--real, meaningful work done artistically by a present adult in a nourishing enviroment that invites imitation and free movement and inspires the imagination, all within a strong rhythm that provides structure and predictabilty, while providing a life free from the over/understimulation of media, overscheduling, judgment, and rushing--already provides developmental help for all children.

Over the years, I find at conference times I spend less time comparing a child to the norms for an age and more time describing objectively what I see the child doing and hear the child saying. As I grow more experienced, I even wonder about my ability to report on a specific child's experience. As Susan Weber told me, we as teachers (and parents) have to be very careful about assuming we know how a child experience's things. A child might watch me move a pile of sand without ever coming to the pile. I might report to the parents about how the child watched intently and did not move. The child might report to the parents that she worked very hard and filled the wheelbarrow over and over and made many trips with the sand. Young children can live very much in a "we" consciousness. The child's report is more accurate than my observation; that was the experience for the child (and the reason why as teachers and parents we do children a great service when we bring intention and beauty to every physical act we do). In twenty years, parents and I might sit in silence at conference time, allowing the enormity of the miracle of child development and imitation to encompass us. In the mean time, I will do my best to keep communication open between home and school.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde