Mary’s School Blog

http://www.sonnyradio.com/duckanddog.html

Not only is this really cute, but it demonstrates one way to adjust to school.

We have just finished our first two weeks of school, and we are all adjusting. Children adjust differently, depending on their age, temperament, and previous experiences, as well as reacting to how you (the parent) is doing, and how we (the teachers) are doing.

Hopefully, the teachers are calm, glad to be there, and prepared to deal with the range of reactions and abilities. Hopefully, you, the parent, feel good about the place and your child’s ability to learn to adapt.

What I like about this video, in addition to the cuteness, is that it is similar to one of the natural ways young children adapt to an environment without a parent. No, they are not imprinting on me, but one way a competent young child (especially a two year old) will adapt is to pick a grownup (or two, or three) and follow him around, watch what she is doing and imitate. By doing this, they learn the schedule, the expectations, the language (“wash dishes?”), how to use the materials, the other children’s names…in short, everything they need to be successful.

Montessori said that children under six were in a stage called “the absorbent mind”, and that children 2 and 3 were in the “unconscious absorbent mind”; that is, they learn with no effort at all.

At 3 and older, they can begin to make more choices (“conscious absorbent mind).

A side effect of this absorbent mind is that this is a period in which habits can be easily formed. Children can easily be taught to take care of themselves: dressing, putting clothes in the hamper, putting toys away, putting dishes in the dishwasher, pouring their own drinks, helping you to put groceries away, helping in the garden, helping to feed pets. Children who try negative behaviors, like tantrums, can more easily learn that they do not work, depending on what you teach them at this stage.

Some children adapt by bonding to one or more other children. This can be another good way to adapt. Some children interact primarily with the materials and the environment. Some children will stand back and watch for a long time. This, too, is appropriate.

The “old timers” are also adapting. The fours are getting used to not having those older role models, moving towards what it is to BE a role model, a teacher. The threes are loving their comfort level with the classroom and their increased abilities; so many things are SO easy now: counting, recognizing number and letters, taking care of their physical needs, seeing what needs to be done in the classroom and doing it, helping other children, socializing.

I believe that Mary’s School is a safe, interesting and rational place for children to learn to rely on their own abilities to adapt. There are so many choices that they can start from their more secure place and slowly move away from that, learning new ways to be in the world, and learning to rely on themselves.

It is one of the joys of the classroom, to see how children adapt and grow throughout the three year cycle.

“All summer I made friends
with the creatures nearby–
they flowed through the fields
and under the tent walls,
or padded through the door,
grinning through their many teeth,
looking for seeds,
suet, sugar;
muttering and humming,
opening the breadbox,
happiest when
there was milk and music…
From Oliver’s The Chance to Love Everything

“Don’t try to mess with me. I’m the equivalent of a 30 year old beat cop or a career fighter pilot.

I have five sons.

And I;m here to tell you the truth about those blue-ribbon babies. They really aren’t just like girls in most essential ways. While they sometimes seem to have the emotional range of single-celled organisms, boys can be moved to tears by anything involving a dog. But they’re unmoved by the tears you shed when you find the cupboard drawer containing the half-eaten pudding (th fossilized pizza…)

And it’s not only boyfriends or husbands who loathe and fear the words, “We need to talk.” Sons do too. Male humans, in my experience, will begin answering questions with monosyllables as soon as they can make disgusting sounds, which is almost immediately. Making those disgusting sounds will serve as an endless source of amusement to them and their friends for at least the next 20 years.

My friends and I came up with an essential test regarding the difference between boys and girls: it’s called the Wet Paint Paradigm. Girls, it seems, can learn from their experiences and even, occasionally, from others’. However, if a boy sees a sign that reads Wet paint, he’ll touch the wall to determine it’s not a joke, and then his friend-standing right behind him-will have to perform the same test with his own finger. Boys are not dumber than girls. They simply have a rugged and individualistic sense of discovery and wonder, untrammeled by prior evidence.

A boy’s got to do it his own way. The sooner a mother learns this, the less time she’ll spend on futile interventions and headache medication.

You can raise your son any way you want to, and, the first chance he gets, he’s still going to burp the national anthem. You can raise your son as a Quaker, a vegan or a pagan; he’s still going to fight with his brother over an unused pen cap as though it were the Star of India.

You can kiss him every night and sing to him of nightingales and give him his own doll and play kitties with him instead of Navy SEALS. Go ahead. He’s still going to make a gun from his toaster waffle and fire it across the table-even if he’s never seen a gun that didn’t squirt water and wasn’t shaped like a caterpillar. If you are quiet and have the patience of Job, as my friend Pam has with her son Carter, who’s 4, your son will still emit shrieks that can make the dog pass out, while running through the house whipping a metal tape measure around his head.

All this make smack of gnder bias. But I know and you know that it is only the unvarnished truth.

In their preverbal (and postcollegiate) years, a boy will crawl under anything, fall off anything, roll over anything, kick anything. He will chew with his mouth open while tipping his chair on its back lets as soon as his legs are long enough.

My boys also have the sex-linked trait for absolute single-mindedness. Long after my daughters have given in and asked for crayons or a board game, my sons will keep looking out at the still-snowless mudslide and insist, :”You said we were going sledding!” And they will sled down the stairs, or through the mud over rocks.

…Heed this furthermore: My sons are considered good, at least by Nanny 911 standards. They’ve never seriously damaged anyone or anything. Okay, maybe the toboggan. And the wall. But nothing important.

And when they are tender, no one can more thoroughly make putty of my heart. Their valentines are smudged with glue and feature not flowers and hearts, but bats or brachiosaurs. Yet those dinosaurs are giving me the same moony grin my sons give when they catch sight of me-even as they attempt to balance their sister on a stack of folding chairs.

…My sons have made me crazy. But they have given me permission to be crazy too. As surely as my two daughters found a room in my spirit and inhabited it totally, the boys knocked down the walls and enlarged the whole place.”

Jaquelyn Mitchard

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/will_wright_makes_toys_that_make_worlds.html