Transformative Power of Engagement

My pace as a working mother with three children in three distinct developmental stages (elementary, middle and high school) is, uh, exhilarating might be the polite word! My experience is not unique and I see my reality mirrored in the lives of many of the adults with whom I partner as a program director. Our day is often juggling many work and personal tasks, doing much, but often feeling behind.

There is an opportunity for children to teach us. Children are not hampered by clocks. Their pace is gauged by their engagement in the moment. Summer is an eternity to a child and a wink to an adult (so is nap time). They have not yet learned to mark the seasons by calendar - memory is fresh for them, so each re-visited experience of time and place is familiar but not stale. When we observe a child stopping, they are actually starting a journey.

It is deeply moving to leave at the end of the day and observe parents match their pace to their child's - this often looks like a slow walk through the Big Garden examining the new daffodils or picking peas. Two year olds explore with curiosity, three year olds with wonder, and four year olds may exclaim "Daffodils, I remember these!" Adults have the opportunity to "borrow the child's eyes" and examine the miracle of green and yellow, the precise sculptural beauty of the daffodil. This is so difficult when we are juggling a lunch box and the pressing schedule of night time chores that wait for us. How do we stop our adult clocks and function at the child's rhythm?

It was my privilege to march for Peace on Cesar Chavez Day 2012 in an event designed and lead by Alternatives in Action youth in response to the murder of children and teens in Oakland. My delight when gathering at Life Academy was to spy my good friend Ella intently observing the Aztec Dancers. She had come with her brother, Grayson, and mom, Wyeth, to support the march for Peace. It is amazing to extrapolate Ella's thought on this day, participating in a march from the viewpoint of 30 inches. Did Ella know today was about peace? What does peace mean to a three year old? Did she feel that this was both a celebration of life (music, dancing, food) and a mourning for those who passed too soon (chants, acknowledgement)? Was this just a sea of knees and balloons in the sky? Maybe what Ella knows is the energy of a group of people dedicated to common cause and gathering peacefully to urgently communicate. Sort of like our PAC meetings or PTSA meetings or the act of voting, but a little different, because the frame was youth-driven and Ella got to see that and that's where she will be in a mere 10 years.

We must know others and allow others to know ourselves. The investment is one of time, but it is also one of presence. Children are born with the full gift of living in the moment and have much to teach us.

How Do We Engage New Families?

There has been meaningful learning about the opportunity for Home Sweet Home to reflect on how we welcome new families in to our learning community. As we understand our best practices and reach out and support their transition, we can reflect on what works, why it works, and where we may want to grow our capacity around this important piece.

There is this process of acculturation - even as parents (and children) newly engage with their closely vetted choice of preschool there are unknowns and not fully knowns about the learning community that are only remedied through relationship and experience. What level of intentionality do individuals bring to knowing and being known by others? How can we offer the gift of our best selves to support welcome and transition?

Home Sweet Home communication strategies:

Parent Handbook

daily whiteboard update

AIA Facebook page

HSH blog

monthly Parent Advisory Committee meetings

HSH Parent Google Group

Home Sweet Home arc of Parent Education:

July - New Parent Orientation

September - Back to Preschool Night

November - Parent-Teacher Conference

March - Parent Education Night

May - Parent-Teacher Conference

Home Sweet Home recurring alumni-inclusive events:

triannual BUILDs

September - Big Friend Reception

October - Harvest Festival

December - Joy Through Music

March - Sweet Moments

May - Big Friend Presentation of Learning

June - Key Ceremony for HSH Graduates

July - Friendship Party

How do we open the door of welcome to Alternatives in Action's Home Sweet Home Preschool? There is an opportunity for continued dialogue on this important piece.

Nature Education

“Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking and feeling and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (Emile)

Home Sweet Home Preschool is committed to providing children with Nature Education. Nowhere is this more observable than in the parent-teacher-partnership-created gardens and naturescapes accessible to children for over 5 hours daily on the playground. Potential interactions include exploration of bark, grass, sand, water and varied plants and the animals and insects they attract. Adults and youth observe children's wonder and discovery as they choose to engage with these many opportunities.

A beautiful example of child-initiated, adult-framed project work was the Green Activity facilitated by Kris Palmer (Katy's mom) with small groups of children on March 1, 2012. After children had weeks of exploring the carpentry project and wondering about what would be added in, Kris responded to our new parent-designed and created planter with bags of soil and lettuces to plant. She and Teacher Dan engaged groups of 6-8 children with the hard work of moving supplies and planting vegetables, and then tending to the Big Garden while encouraging discussion. Kris is only one of the Home Sweet Home parents who donates hours of her interest and expertise to ensuring our access to Nature Education.

During early childhood, the main objective of environmental education should be the development of empathy between the child and the natural world. In addition to regular opportunities to explore and play in nature, one of the best ways to foster empathy with young children is to cultivate relationships to animals. This includes exposure to indigenous animals, both real and imagined (Sobel 1996). Children interact instinctively and naturally with animals, talk to them, and invest in them emotionally. A little-known fact about children and animals is that studies of the dreams of children younger than age 6 reveal that as many as 90% of their dreams are about animals (Acuff 1997; Patterson 2000). Children’s exposure to relationships with animals needs to be cultivated with live animal contact and animal-based stories, songs and other experiences. Developing an emotional connectiveness—empathy—to the natural world is the essential foundation for the later stages of environmental education (Sobel 1996 & 2008).

Children experience the natural environment differently than adults. Adults usually see nature as background for what they are doing, as a visual, aesthetic experience. Children experience nature holistically. It is not merely a background to their events, but rather as a provocation to and experiential component of their activities. Children judge nature not by its asesthetics, but rather by the manner of their interactions and sensory experiences with it. (White and Stoecklin, 2008) That is why children have more love for a mud puddle than for formal, sculpted grounds, even if adults may feel the reverse.

Biophilia = "love of nature" Children have an innate, genetically predisposed tendency to explore and bond with the natural world. For children’s natural inclination of biophilia to develop they must be given developmentally appropriate opportunities to learn about the natural world based on sound principles of child development and learning. If children’s natural attraction to nature is not given opportunities to flourish during their early years, biophobia, an aversion to nature may develop. Biophobia ranges from discomfort and fear in natural places to contempt for whatever is not man-made or adult-managed - such a child would fare poorly at summer camp, and may have a lifelong addiction to air-conditioning. More critically, biophobia may also manifest in the regard of nature as nothing more than a disposable resource.

HOME-TO-SCHOOL CONNECTION Home Sweet Home grows in its commitment to children's Nature Education through planning with families to ensure that these authentic, hands-on experience are respected as foundational learning. Parents are encouraged to photograph their child as they engage authentically with nature. Please help your child print their first name on a 6" to 8" piece of paper and paste their photo to it. This can be brought in and displayed on the yellow flowered bulletin board by March 29!

March 1, 2012

Home Sweet Home Preschool enjoyed attendance of over 60% of enrolled families at our late Winter Parent Education Night on Thursday, March 1, 2012 from 6:00PM-8:00PM. Nine families attended the Open House on the same day at 5:00PM.

Set-Up by BASE Big Friends:
Alejandra, Carla, Celeste, Cesar, Edgar, Erika, Marri

Big Friend Babysitting:
Janet and Jessica from Life Academy, and Carlos, Jasmine, and Rebecca from Bay Area School of Enterprise

Potential Families Open House - Youth Overview:
Keith

Parent Education Greeters and Ice Breaker Facilitation:
Alejandra, Marlene from Life Academy

With much gratitude to all for being willing to give and share of yourselves as we partner to create our learning community!

Reggio Inspired

Home Sweet Home seeks partnership with families for Early Childhood Education. The ability to create a learning community is possible only by sharing founding principles and current practices prior to a family's engagement. Through the Alternatives in Action website and our Home Sweet Home Parent Handbook, we have attempted to articulate our point of view of Early Childhood. Parents must have accurate information so they can assess best fit for their child.

Rejecting Perfectionism Young children and their teachers benefit when they learn a work style that includes successive approximations before reaching a final product. These successive attempts can be thought of as editing, and the Reggio Emilia approach offers patterns to help children achieve this style of work. Teachers should strive to free children from the burden of instant perfectionism so that they can instead develop skills in investigation, communication, and creativity. Teachers hold the role of co-researcher, not "the knower of all things". HSH teachers seek to give children, parents and themselves permission to reject perfectionism. The Home Sweet Home Reggio -inspired learning community is about the journey.

Role of the Teacher HSH teachers make intentional decisions during interaction with children. We reflect on what occurs in the environment. Our approach to young children is responsive not coercive. We seek to understand their perspective and learn from it. Teacher behavior is rich and varied along several continua: soft-hard, simple-complex, open-closed, intrusion-seclusion, and high versus low mobility. This cannot be scripted - in working with young children, teachers engage in a gentle dance of give and take that allows the child autonomy, choice and freedom.

Project-based Learning Reggio principles applied in learning communities founded within the American culture often war with the US cultural bias for "faster, better, brighter" and "the one right answer." This can be extrapolated from how some school districts choose to interpret content standards in curriculum and teacher practice as a reaction to increasingly test-driven assessment. In "Democracy and Education," Dewey suggests that when teaching is dominated by specific goals, the educational process becomes static; there is an unnatural separation between the activity the student engages in to reach the goal and the goal itself. Thus, the activity has no educational purpose beyond reaching this goal and does not teach the student how to learn beyond this very specific situation. Dewey suggests instead that education be based on a series of dynamic aims. The aims of the activity emerge from the activity itself, and they serve only as temporary beacons for the activity. As soon as an aim is achieved, that achievement creates activity leading to another aim. Long-term projects, a cornerstone of Reggio practice, can be perfect vehicles for this type of approach to education.

Reggio principles and practices offer a strong commitment to developmentally appropriate practice in a play-based learning environment to meet the needs of the Whole Child and to support physical, social-emotional and cognitive development. These foundational, principle-based practices may look inflexible as there are pieces that are non-negotiable, as altering the practices would violate the principles. As parents have questions around academic next steps for their child, every effort is made to support their understanding of the WHY and the HOW that goes into our work at Home Sweet Home.

The parent-teacher partnership is essential to the successful relationship of a family with Home Sweet Home. HSH teachers are inspired daily by the parent impact through daily interactions, volunteerism and a strong, positive voice. We know the parent is a child's first teacher and the most essential relationship throughout their childhood. Home Sweet Home honors the parent's role and respects the honor parents give our learning community when they choose to engage with us.