God forbade...must reading!

Creative Schooling




Rudolph Steiner- Waldorf Schools



  Rudolph Steiner began Waldorf schools dedicated to generating an inner enthusiasm for learning within every child. Even seemingly dry and academic subjects are presented in a pictorial, dynamic way. This eliminates the need for competitive testing, academic placement and behavioristic rewards to motivate learning. It allows motivation to arise from within and helps engender the capacity for joyful lifelong learning.



  Over many years of observing children in free play, those who engage in free make-believe, what Piaget called symbolic play, are more joyful, smile and laugh more often than those who seem at odds with themselves- the children who wander aimlessly around the nursery, or daycare center, looking for something to do, who play, preservatively, with a few blocks, or who annoy their peers by teasing them or interrupting thier games.



  Steiner said love is higher than opinion. If people love one another the most varied opinions can be reconciled. This is one of the most important tasks for humankind. We should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of development is empty.


The Vital Role of Play in Childhood


Joan Almon




Sarah Smilansky



 Sara Smilansky, an Israeli researcher, studied children at play in Israel and the United States. She defines dramatic play when a child pretends to be someone else, socio-dramatic play when two, or more, children cooperate in such role playing. She said the results point to dramatic and socio-dramatic play, a strong medium for the development of cognitive and socioemotional skills.



  Smilansky said creative play is a central activity in the lives of healthy young children. It helps children weave together all elements of life, as they experience it. It allows them to digest life, make it their own. It's an outlet for the fullness of their creativity, an absolutely critical part of their childhood. With creative play children blossom and flourish, without it they suffer a serious decline.



  Smilansky said school children no longer have the freedom to explore woods, fields, to find their own special places. Physical education and recess are being eliminated, new schools are built without playgrounds. Informal ball games are a thing of the past as children are herded into athletic leagues from age five on.



  She said creative play is like a spring that bubbles up from deep within. It's refreshing, enlivening, a natural part of the make-up of every healthy child. It's so fundamental to a child's make-up it's often hard to separate play from learning. Whether children are working on new physical skills, social relations or cognitive content they approach life with a playful spirit. As a friend said of her daughter,



                                     "It seems she's working all the time"



But, is it work or play? In childhood, there is no distinction.



  The simple truth is young children are born with a most wonderful urge to grow and learn. They continually develop new skills and capacities. If they are allowed to set the pace, with a little adult help, they will work at all this in a playful and tireless way. Rather than respecting this innate drive to learn, we treat children as if they can learn only what we adults can teach them. We strip them of their innate confidence in directing their own learning, hurry them along and, often, wear them out. It's no wonder that so many teachers complain that by age nine or ten children seem burned out and uninterested in learning.



  Smilansky concludes sociodramatic play activates resources that stimulate emotional, social and intellectual growth, which, in turn, affect the child's success in school. We saw many similarities between patterns of behavior bring successful sociodramatic play experiences and patterns required for successful integration in school. For example, problem solving in most school subjects requires a great deal of make-believe: visualizing how Eskimos live, reading stories, imagining a story and writing it down, solving arithmetic problems and determining what comes next. History, geography and literature are all make-believe. All of these are conceptual constructions, never directly experienced by the child.



Maria Montessori



  Maria Montessori focused on teaching students to develop their own skills at a pace they set, a principle she called  'spontaneous self-development'. A wide variety of special equipment of increasing complexity is used to help direct children's interest and hasten development. When a child is ready to learn new and more difficult tasks, the teacher guides the child's first endeavors to avoid wasted effort, learning wrong habits, otherwise, the child learns alone. The Montessori teaching method is known to enable children to learn to read and write more quickly with greater facility.



  The Montessori school concentrates on quality, than quantity. The success of these schools sparked the opening of many more and a worldwide interest in the Montessori methods of education.



Wikipedia