Calendar Reminders/Work in Early Childhood

CALENDAR REMINDERS

No class for nursery of parent & child class on Friday, March 23.  It is Grandparent's Day.  If a grandparent does wish to attend for a special early childhood experience (8:45ish to 9:45ish), please let me know yesterday--or the first Monday after St. Patrick's Day.

Our young children, with their parents and/or grandparents, may well enjoy the Rainbow Circus assembly at 11am on the 23rd at Huckleberry Hall (right in sight of the Butterfly Room).  Check the school's newsletter on Sunday night for more information.

Our final classes for nursery and parent & child before a 2 week spring break will be on March 29 (nursery) and March 30 (parent & child).  Please remember that the nursery is closed along with the kindergartens on April 2 - 4 even though the elementary grades are in session.

WORK AND PLAY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

With delight I rediscovered an article by Glenda Moore (experienced kindergarten teacher) that informed much of my work and parent education when I was a green nursery and parent & child teacher a decade ago.  I have been listening to many Rudolf Steiner lectures recently (rudolfsteineraudio.com), and I find I stand bolt upright whenever Steiner emphasizes the importance of intentionally engaging in meaningful and beautiful and practical work in the presence of young children, much like whenever the Shepherds hear or speak the word "wolf" in the Oberufer Shepherds Play.  Over the years and over recent weeks, making work accessible and joyful and lawful and loving has been a path with which I have encountered more or less success, chances for improvement, chances to watch my hair gray, chances to take deep breaths, and the like.  Each group of child (and parents), in concert with the varying physical spaces, seems to evoke a different array of tasks that provide nourishment.  I find myself doing the dance of finding that just right balance between being too rigid ("What do you mean ironing isn't nourishing this group of children!  It has always worked for me") and potentially breaking one of Nancy Foster's commandments by yielding to whim of a child or parent or me ("Am I giving up on this task just because I am bored?  Or because this child, who really needs me to be in charge, is testing me to see if I will stay in charge?").

Compromise and logistics give me pleasure--with occasional consternation, and not infrequent joy.  I have been pleased with the way, for example, Lynne and the children and I have tended the garden in front of our nursery room.  It has never quite flowed naturally to have the whole class work or play right in the garden (not being in a play-yard but as a gateway to a more wide-open elementary playground), so finally we had Lynne or me take 2 children outside early to assist, while the other teacher washed dishes inside and guided the tidying up of the room.  After experiments of floor care that provided varying nourishment (some of you will remember the frequency with which children pulled apart the Bissells to wield the handle as a weapon; I was wise enough to remove them completely in setting up the current nursery children for social success), I am pretty happy with a hi-tech yet simple and sturdy rubber broom that actually gets sand and dirt out of a carpet.  Sweeping is such a lovely activity to bathe children in.  I find myself make judgment calls about how much imagination I allow children to use with the broom.  It is a dance:  my sense is that we as adults benefit when we imbue our work with more of a sense of play (while retaining reverence), and I know of studies in which children solve problems better if they are allowed to play freely with problem solving tools, yet the benefits of bathing children in the real work of sweeping are lost if the broom is always squirreled away as a rifle in a fort.

What follows is Moore's article, which I found at this address 

http://www.climbingrosekindergarten.com/articles.htm#Work_and_Play

Work and Play in the Home and Waldorf KindergartenAs adults we often find a feeling of distaste creeping into our attitude about work. I saw a bumper sticker that illustrated this perfectly - "The worst day fishing is better than the best day working," it said. Enlivening the repetitive homemaking tasks (cooking, washing dishes, cleaning windows) can provide a special challenge.  So we develop feelings about our necessary tasks that lead us to wish for more 'play' time and a dichotomy between work and play develops within us. The young child has no such duality in his/her being. Work and play form a marvelous, flowing lemniscates. Play is the joyful out breathing inspired by the working grown-ups who surround the child.  Work, the inbreathing, becomes creative and joyous activity, indistinguishable from play. When we hurry to finish our work so we can 'play' with our child, or always respond to the insistent demands to 'play with me' on the child's level, we have given up a precious opportunity to help our child answer a most important question - how do we live upon the earth?In the Waldorf kindergarten, we work thoughtfully with this question, bringing knowledge to the children, not through our words and intellect, but through our deeds, our rhythmic working through the days and weeks - for we know that the children learn through imitation, through doing. Therefore the grown-ups are nearly always engaged in some useful task - sewing, cleaning, cooking, gardening; even visitors are given some handwork to do. And yet mere outward busyness is not really the aim at all; there can often be a frantic and goal-oriented quality to our work that sweeps the present out of our consciousness. A poem, penned by some anonymous hand, presents an ideal picture of work.  

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love,  

But only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work 

And sit at the gate of the temple and
Take alms from those who work with joy. 

Certainly, while we live upon the earth, there are few of us who can always work with a positive inward attitude and yet it is something to strive towards. But if our childhood experience with work was unpleasant, as in "Get in there and clean your room," how can we transform our prejudice? There are movements in work - the rhythm of sweeping with the broom, the dishwashing that brings a swirl of bubbles on a plate, the chop-chop of the hoe, the push and sway of kneading bread.  There is movement in dance as well and many find the joy of dance easy to discover. When we move to music in dance we are often one with the movement - there is no separation of thinking and doing - our awareness is in our feet and our hands. I wonder if we can find the joyful dancing movement of sweeping the floor, the precision of folding a towel with our full attention.

Perhaps it may be easier if, at first, we try sweeping or mopping the floor in slow motion as if we were a mime artist or a Tai Chi master, to help bring our full awareness into our movement. When we are one with our doing, a feeling of peace is often attendant.  We enliven our own picture of work and we become ready to work with the children. And, yes, it often takes more time to complete the tasks with these small helpers beside us, but the effort reaps great rewards for now and far into the future.

Here are some practical suggestions for including the children in our day-to-day work in a meaningful way:

Laundry: There are opportunities here for sorting the clothes into different colors, matching socks, folding and delivering clothes to various destinations. If there is hand washing to be done, the possibilities are even richer.  A small scrub board can be used, the clothes swirled in the rinse water, wrung out and, most wonderful of all, hung on the line to dry. When my daughter was small, I had a clothesline up high and she had one at her height.Dishes: The adult can wash and the child can rinse, playing with the dishes as boats in the sink of water. Or the child can wash a few select and special items - colander, wire whisk, in the rainbow bubbly water while mother or father is making dinner nearby.Cooking/Baking: My four, five and six year olds are fine and serious chefs and quite capable of chopping vegetables if they are first cut into thin strips (potatoes are easiest, carrots more difficult).  When baking, bowls and sifters are placed around and dedicated workers arise - the flour is recycled through several siftings and high mountains are created. Pans can be oiled, stirring is a joy and, when making bread, kneading and shaping the dough is the ultimate creative, modeling experience.General Cleaning: Children enjoy holding the dustpan. They love dusting with a feather or lambs wool duster, sweeping the cobwebs down and cleaning windows. They can have a little basket of cleaning supplies, complete with window cleaner spray and rag.Outside: Raking leaves and grass at appropriate times of year are especially enjoyed. Piles of grass or leaves can be hauled around in a wagon and used to create wonderful forts and nests.  Gardening offers rich possibilities for planting, watering and gathering. A word about tools: the child's tools, inside and out, should be real tools so they can be used without frustration and breakage. Though the initial expense of a good shovel may seem prohibitive, the quality tool will outlast the toy many times over, especially if cared for properly.The children will want to move in and out of our work, joining for a time, drifting off to work and play of their own. When I think of my own work experiences as a child, one moment shines forth as a transcendent experience. At four years of age, I was visiting my grandparents who lived on a farm; I had always lived in apartments.  My grandmother, whose greatest joy in life was gardening, was moving slowly ahead of me making holes in the soft spring earth. I followed her, carefully dropping beans in the holes, reverently patting the earth over them. I felt the mystery of our act in my very bones; I was sure those were magic seeds, and I was in the midst of a fairy tale. The very light of this memory still has a golden and glowing reflection. Such moments bring their own special blessing to later life, blessings that follow from the child's joy-in-work as surely as evening follows morning.