Doing It Our Way

This is very cool! Thank you for voting for my little labor of love!

For a full list of winner click here.

I am excited for myself, of course, it would be a lie to say otherwise, but I also am convinced that this kind of acknowledgment is really about all of our passion and commitment to early childhood education. Several of us ECE-types took home Edublog awards yesterday (Irresistible Ideas For Play Based Learning, Teach Preschool, PreKinders, to name a few). And I want to send a special shout out to Juliet over at I'm A Teacher, Get Me OUTSIDE Here! for rallying us for the cause.

I'd like to say our collective success is a commentary on the growing recognition of the importance of early childhood generally and inquiry-based, progressive education in general, but I really believe, for this go-around at least, it's more a testament to the strength of this online community of educators and parents we've built here during the past year or so. Something's happening. I can't wait to see what we can do if we keep at it for a few more years. 

I'm looking forward to a day when none of us need to defend the educational benefits of being outside, in the garden on a cold, wet day, using mortars and pestles to grind the herbs we snipped ourselves, mixing them with rainwater and smashed cranberries, and, for good measure, adding liquid watercolor with pipettes, all according to our own curiosities.

I'm looking forward to a day when everyone innately understands that we need to use our whole bodies to learn, that we need to get down on the floor, to lay our hands on our learning materials, to be able to figure out what we should do when my train meets your train and my ego meets your ego at the intersection of a figure 8, because that's the natural consequence of living in a world of other people.

I'm looking forward to a day when we all agree that it's unhealthy to cram our children full of letters, numbers, facts, and figures as if they are merely empty vessels that need to be filled, then tested for how well they conform to some arbitrary standard, before being shuttled off to the next place that will fill them up. I'm looking forward to when we no longer treat our children as products on a factory conveyor, being manufactured according to the specifications of industry who want to consume them as human resources.

I'm looking forward to a day when everyone understands that no one has ever educated another person, but rather that we all ultimately educate ourselves and sometimes that means choosing to carry an umbrella when it isn't raining, wearing safety glasses simply for the experience, and taking an art project designed by a teacher and doing it our way.