Child Led Learning

I was first introduced to this idea when I worked at a Reggio-Emilia-inspired Quaker pre-school in Durham, North Carolina; an awesome place I have very fond memories of! I was a teachers' aide and absolutely adored watching the teachers set the guide posts while allowing the students to decide just about everything else within those posts. Example: we'd take a field trip on a Durham city bus headed to the Duke Campus, but where on campus we stopped, the conversations engaged in and the questions explored would more often than not be up to the children.

I'm no expert and quite frankly have a lot to learn, but in general, the major benefit to this is that the child is fully engaged with the material. When you head back to the "classroom" or in our case, "school table," you can use your notes (mental, or otherwise) of that child-led experience to tie in to more structured work and increase engagement then.

Additional benefit: when you make a habit of relating those child-led experiences to the more structured moments, the children learn to make those connections too. And the best part, this sort of connection and authentic engagement just puts everyone in a good mood!

That happened to us today and it was so rewarding! Seriously, I get a proud smile remembering it. The pre-reading curriculum we're using has this beautiful alphabet poster that has a toad sitting by the capital T. That T-for toad picture also appears in the program's daily rhyming poem book.

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It's mostly our four-year old daughter who engages with that curriculum, but all the children like the rhymes and play alphabet games with me right after our opening prayer/meditation. Today, our son had to run outside on a quick errand during math. When he came back he said "you gotta come see this Toad. Just like the T!"

So we paused math, ran outside and ended up not only learning about the Woodhouse Toad (we think!), but also exercising about empathy muscles. Before touching the toad, we looked up whether it might be venomous (it can be for dogs!) but decided it was probably safe for us to try to touch. Our daughter barely got a touch when the toad decided to hide in Timmy the turtle's burrow. "Oh no!" she exclaimed." Meanwhile, her brother asked "can we research if it's venomous to turtles?!" And while I looked, a line I won't soon forget: "Man! I'm loving this science stuff!"

After that, the rest of math was a breeze!

I'll let you all know as soon as we confirm Timmy is alright, he's been our neighbor since we parked the camper here. Very well loved by the children.