A child fell and bumped her head hard enough that we decided to apply an ice pack. I fetched one of those single-use gel packs that one activates by squeezing it in the middle until the internal bag pops and the chemicals mix. I had left one of our parent-teachers at the scene wi … | Continue reading
Psychologist and author of the book Changing Our Minds, Naomi Fisher, once told me that her three-year-old son took an early interest in numbers. One day as they walked together through their neighborhood, he noticed of the house addresses. "Did you know," he asked his mother, "t … | Continue reading
I never pretend to know what kids will learn on any given day and, honestly, any teacher who does is either deluded or blowing smoke. No one can possibly know what another person is going to learn. You can hope. You can plan. You can lecture yourself blue. You can even, if you're … | Continue reading
I receive a fair number of newly published early childhood/teaching books, often unsolicited, with the idea that I'll write a review or otherwise promote it on the blog. I don't read them all -- indeed, I only tend to read those that come from authors who I know or who previously … | Continue reading
The opposite of play isn't work, it's rote. ~Edward Hollowell This might sound like an odd thing for a teacher to write, but I sometimes get the idea that knowing stuff is the enemy of education. There is little gratification in it for me when I've envisioned how children will do … | Continue reading
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. ~John Dewey People tend to have one of two responses when I tell them I'm a teacher. Either they say something like, "Good for you . . . Such important work," or they roll their eyes and puff out their cheeks in com … | Continue reading
I started this blog in 2009 simply because I'd written a couple articles for Seattle's Child magazine that I thought were pretty good and felt they deserved a life beyond the recycling bin. That was the entirety of my ambition. This blog would provide an online home for these two … | Continue reading
The central idea behind Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution is that it is driven by survival and "chance variation." The survival part, and "survival of the fittest" in particular, is the aspect we tend to celebrate in popular culture, such as law-of-the-jungle reality game show … | Continue reading
Not long ago, I witnessed a scene in which one boy began to cry because another boy, entirely by accident, knocked over his block construction. The second boy almost immediately broke into tears as well. Then, a third boy who had not been involved in any way, joined the first two … | Continue reading
It's odd celebrating Labor Day in this country given the war being waged against labor by many of the most powerful members of our society, and the outright vitriol coming from elected representatives who malign working men and women as nothing more than selfish, lazy, union thug … | Continue reading
I've spent my entire classroom career working shoulder-to-shoulder with the parents of the children I taught. As a cooperative school, to enroll children in our classes, an adult, typically a parent, but sometimes a grandparent, nanny, or other caretaker, was required to attend a … | Continue reading
Play is like love or happiness. We can't define it, but we know it when we see it, when we feel it, when we're in the midst of it. Play is likewise like love or happiness in that if you think about it too much, it has a habit of disappearing or morphing into something else. On Tu … | Continue reading
We never had a teeter totter (i.e., seesaw) on our playground, but the children often made their own, usually by pivoting a plank of wood over a log. Sometimes they would put the plank of over one of our swings and call it a "teeter swing." The contraptions could also easily evol … | Continue reading
In his bestselling book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt's central claim is that "overprotection in the real world and underproduction in the virtual world . . . are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation." We've certainly all seen it i … | Continue reading
My wife and I recently saw the movie Sing Sing starring Coleman Domingo. Most of the other actors are men who were once highly violent, anti-social men which is how they wound up imprisoned in the notorious maximum security Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. Although th … | Continue reading
I was sitting on a bench near a playground merry-go-round watching our three and four-year-olds play. A pair of boys decided they wanted a spin. They mounted the apparatus, then one of them turned to me, "Teacher Tom, you push us." I answered, "Sorry, I'm busy sitting here. You'l … | Continue reading
The Netflix series 3 Body Problem envisions a scenario in which a more advanced alien civilization, originally seeking to co-existing with humans, decides they must instead destroy us because they've learned that we are capable of lying. Even our ability to invent fictional stori … | Continue reading
Karntakuringu Jakurrpa I've been driving cars for 45 years. It's been decades since I spent time and energy thinking about driving. I just do it. When I was first behind the wheel, when I was learning about driving, I had to think about every aspect of what I was doing, but today … | Continue reading
One of the things Seattle's teachers won in their 2015 strike was a commitment from the school district that elementary school students would receive a minimum of 30 minutes of recess per day. In fairness, some schools were already providing more than that, but there were several … | Continue reading
I met this four-year-old boy because he had been forced to leave his previous preschool. Apparently, he had taken to hitting, biting, kicking, and otherwise abusing the adults around him. From what I'd been told, and I didn't quite buy it, he got along well with other kids, it wa … | Continue reading
"I know!" "I've got an idea!" "Teacher Tom, look at this!" The soundtrack of a play-based preschool is punctuated by expressions of these "eureka moments." Sometimes the children run up to me in groups, grab my arms to pull me over to what they have collectively discovered or inv … | Continue reading
We've all noticed that children's play tends to be more imaginative when they're outdoors and scientists have proven it. This is likewise true for adults: we are all more innovative when outdoors. We're not entirely sure why this is, but among the theories are that we've evolved … | Continue reading
I looked up to see a familiar face. For a moment, however, I couldn't place it, but then recognized my friend who I'd not seen since he was five-years-old. "I recognize you!" I blurted before his name came back to me. He was standing with his mom, pressed into her legs shyly, a p … | Continue reading
There is no agreed upon scientific definition of consciousness. The same goes for intelligence and communication. This is likewise, famously, true for love. Cognitive psychologists, philosophers and other who study human consciousness call it "the hard problem." We think consciou … | Continue reading
"(A)s I gaze around the Hoh Rain Forest I see more than a soothing wash of green. I see a masterclass in living to one's fullest, weirdest, most resourceful potential." ~Zöe Schlanger If you've been paying attention to national politics in US these past couple weeks, the word "we … | Continue reading
"You need power only when you want to do something harmful, otherwise love is enough to get everything done." ~Charlie Chaplin As a younger teacher, I spent a lot of time reading about the education of young children. That's how I came to learn about such child-centered models as … | Continue reading
Several years ago, while walking in downtown Seattle, I turned a corner to find a group of people looking up. I looked up too. We seemed to be looking at the rows of balconies of the Warwick Hotel. I couldn't figure out why we were looking up, so I looked again at the people with … | Continue reading
"We're playing Pokemon." "I want to play Paw Patrol." "Well, we're playing Pokemon." "I don't want to play Pokemon." The boys who had been playing Pokemon all morning, shrugged. One of them said, "I'm Rocky and he's Marshall . . . You can be Chase." The girl who wanted to play wi … | Continue reading
Anthony James Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli writes: "We figured out (two millennia ago) that the Earth is spherical, and (half a millennium ago) that it moves. At first glance these are absurd ideas, since the Earth appears to us to be flat and still. In order to digest suc … | Continue reading
Socrates is arguably the most famous teacher of all time, at least in Western culture. His Socratic Method is a type of argumentative dialog between individuals, usually a student and teacher, that involves asking and answering ever more probing and confrontational questions. Ide … | Continue reading
Parents are forever trying to get their kids to say things to me. "Say 'Good morning' to Teacher Tom." "Say 'Thank you' to Teacher Tom." "Tell Teacher Tom your name." I get it, of course, parents want their children to be courteous, or at least responsive, and when they aren't th … | Continue reading
"Don't worry Leon, you can always make some more blood." I heard Luke say it in passing, consoling his friend, as I was on my way to somewhere else. Not having heard what came before or after, it struck me as both hilarious and intriguing. I couldn't help but try to bring it up a … | Continue reading
A child psychologist friend once told me that he kept a doll house in his office, explaining that he could often learn more about a child while playing "family" than in any number of hours of traditional talk therapy. I'm no therapist, but I can certainly see the potential there. … | Continue reading
On the first day of school he told me, "There's going to be a lot of fighting this year." It was an interesting comment, funny even, coming from this particular boy. I'd known him since he was a two-year-old and he had never shown any inclination toward violence, real or imaginar … | Continue reading
Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable. ~David W. Augsburger I've been having a lot of conversations with business people lately about teaching. I've been a preschool teacher for nearly two decades, yet I'm having a h … | Continue reading
I went to kindergarten back in the 1960's. We played outdoors, built with blocks, pretended, and made some art. I don't think there was any particular curriculum or ideology behind the program offered by Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Ruiz. We mostly played, much like the kids do at Wood … | Continue reading
"(A)after years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain-action alone, I have come to the conclusion that it is simpler (and far easier to be logical) if one adopts the hypothesis that our being does not consist of two fundamental elements . . . (T)here is no good ev … | Continue reading
Long before I even considered a career in early childhood, I had a boss who liked to joke, "I'll give you enough rope to hang yourself." It was his macabre way of saying that he was going to trust his underlings to make our own decisions about how to use our time, how to tackle a … | Continue reading
While the other children played a game of tea party, she spent her morning painting her hands with tempura paint, then washing them off in the soapy water in the sensory table. As the other children pretended to eat play dough cookies, she mastered the cycle of applying paint and … | Continue reading
She stopped right inside the gate. In fact, her mother had to nudge her through and there she stood looking at our junkyard playground for the first time. She was only two-years-old and her mother had brought her to the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool for the first time. She … | Continue reading
The boy was running at full speed when he tripped and fell chin first. As falls go, it wasn't a particularly hard one and thankfully the surface on which he fell was forgiving, but the impact startled him and he came up crying. I wasn't far from where he fell, but still wasn't th … | Continue reading
"Common sense" once told us that the Earth is flat. Up until around 1800 the "status quo" was that three out of every four humans lived in some form of slavery. And "human nature" has been used as the shoulder-shrugging excuse for almost every atrocious or malignant act ever comm … | Continue reading
As a child, there were certain adults who I instantly liked, whereas there were others for whom I would take an immediate dislike. It generally came down to how they treated me. If they looked me in the eye, spoke in their normal voice, laughed at my jokes, not my mistakes, and r … | Continue reading
I've been having fantastic dreams lately. I won't bore you with the details because no one cares much about another person's dream (unless, of course, they themselves show up in it). This is probably because, if you believe those who study dreams, they are largely egocentric wish … | Continue reading
People are often surprised when I say or write that safety is our number one responsibility when it comes to our work with young children. After all, human babies are born uniquely vulnerable compared to other species and they stay that way for quite some time. Psychologist and a … | Continue reading
I was watching a boy playing around under the swings as a classmate was swinging. It wasn't a particularly risky activity in my view. I mean, I was standing right there, taking pictures, discussing it with him, and it didn't set off any alarm bells for me in the moment, although … | Continue reading
Registration is now open for the 2024 cohort for my 6-week course for educators and parents, Teacher Tom's Risky Play. Most of the time we refer to it as "risky play," although some have argued that it wold more accurately called "challenging play" or even "safety play." For many … | Continue reading
Yesterday, the mother of a child from my 2012 class told me that she and her daughter were off in a few days to tour colleges. As a preschool teacher, it's easy to lose track of former students, especially more than a decade later, but this family has stayed in touch. The followi … | Continue reading