A friend recently purchased a new home. The first thing she did was paint the walls, because, as she said, the old color depressed her. We all know that our surroundings can have a significant impact on how we feel and even behave. And this is even more true for young children. A … | Continue reading
"No climbing to the top!" When our daughter was in kindergarten, her school installed an amazing rope-and-steel climbing structure. The kindergartners were forbidden from climbing to the very top, which meant that adults were always hovering around the thing, "reminding" the chil … | Continue reading
In 1971, architect Simon Nicholson wrote an article for a magazine called Landscape Architecture entitled “How Not to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts.” Perhaps it wasn’t the first time that the phrase “loose parts play” was used, but it was this manifesto that in many w … | Continue reading
Auke-Florian Hiemstra/Naturalis Biodiversity Center There was a street light just outside the living room window of my second-story downtown Seattle apartment. On top of the light fixture were ugly spikes, fixed there to prevent birds from landing on it. As far as I could tell, i … | Continue reading
Awhile back, a reader left a comment on the Facebook page asking, "If I have $200 to make our playground look a little more like your schoolyard, what should I get?" First off, $200 is a pretty good budget for a project like that, mainly because most of the coolest stuff we have … | Continue reading
Ethologists are zoologists who study the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. They study orcas in the ocean, not Sea World. They study cheetahs on the savannah, not in the zoo. This makes sense. When we study animals in captivity most of what we learn is how that species … | Continue reading
I was recently leaving a downtown store. When I came to the exit door, I saw that it had a handle. I grabbed and pulled. The door didn't budge. I then, counter-intuitively, pushed and the door swung open. This is a prime example of a failure in design: a handle means "pull" and a … | Continue reading
For the past few years, orcas off the coast of Spain and Portugal have been ramming and often sinking smaller boats. Back in the 1980's, pods of orcas in the Pacific Ocean made a fad of wearing dead fish on their heads. The leading theory for these behaviors is play. The orcas do … | Continue reading
Psychologist Kurt Lewin, often recognized as the founder of social psychology and one of the most cited psychologists of the 20th century, developed what is known as Lewin's Equation: B = ƒ(P,E), in which our behavior (B) is a function of our personality (P) in the environment (E … | Continue reading
"Let's pretend . . ." Is there any more beautiful way to start a sentence? It's an invitation to entwine imaginations. Psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik, a pioneering researcher, writes in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter: "By far the most important and interestin … | Continue reading
Walt Whitman wrote: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.) It's perhaps my favorite line from my favorite poem, Song of Myself. It is an acknowledgement that the self is the sum total of everything we have seen, smelled, tas … | Continue reading
There are some who say that if there are humans in the distant future, we'll have to exist without our cute little pinky toes. The rest of our toes still play a role in balance and movement, but the one that goes "wee wee wee all the way home" isn't a significant part of that. Co … | Continue reading
Nothing is certain It could always go wrong. Come in when it's raining Go on out when it's gone. ~The Greatful Dead "Oh brother, not again!" It had become one of our classroom jokes. I have no idea where it came from, but it's a common enough expression that it's not surprising t … | Continue reading
A woman approached me at the entrance to Trader Joe's the other day. She wanted to talk to me about a group she belongs to that meditates for world peace. I have nothing against either meditation or world peace, but I was hoping to get in-and-out, so I took the card she handed me … | Continue reading
A parent pointed out that her son was eating raw kale that he had picked from the playground garden. "He won't touch it at home, but here, he devours it!" This isn't the first we've heard of this phenomenon at Woodland Park. In fact, we see it almost every day. One spring, I ment … | Continue reading
Some time ago, we took the children on a field trip to the local post office. We were a group of some 20 children and eight adults. The woman giving us our tour introduced herself as Ms. Lui, before insisting that the children get in a line. It was an inauspicious start. The kids … | Continue reading
"Teacher Tom, it's really quiet here." I was sitting with the three-year-old at a table. There were puzzle pieces in front of us, but we were just goofing around, making no effort to assemble them. Objectively, it wasn't quiet. There were children squealing, laughing, and low-key … | Continue reading
We didn't have a huge set of big wooden blocks, which was okay because we didn't really have enough space for more and besides, if the kids are going to play with them, they generally needed to find a way to play with them together, which is what our school was all about. The kid … | Continue reading
Mark Toby Prisoners placed in isolation, even for a relatively short period of time, experience anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, cognitive impairment, and an increased risk of self-harm and suicide. These conditions often persist even after they are released. Babies … | Continue reading
"The center of the universe is everywhere," writes Rebecca Solnit in her retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, Waking Beauty (or Eleven Times Upon a Time), "and of course it always seems to be right where you are, so there are more centers than there are drops of rain in a … | Continue reading
Last night, I attended a community "open mic" event in which our neighbors took turns showing off their talents. I was there at the invitation of my friend Bill, an older man who lost his wife a little over three years ago. In fact, the first words I ever spoke to him were in con … | Continue reading
I stepped out into a windy morning. The sky overhead was swept clean of clouds, although they lurked around the fringes. But what caught my eye were the ravens. Dozens of them swirling in the wind that came, uncharacteristically, out of the south, wings spread, rarely flapping, b … | Continue reading
Awhile back, I read the disgusting story of a police officer and his wife who were arrested for handcuffing and jailing his own three-year-old overnight, for two nights in a row, for the "crime" of soiling himself. Their defense is that it was their parental right. Thankfully, Fl … | Continue reading
In the 1970's, scientists "discovered" that marine animals produce D-amino acids. I put the word "discovered" in quotes because they were hardly the first to know this: catfish have known, and exploited this fact as a way to sense their world, for hundreds of millions of years. G … | Continue reading
When I became a preschool teacher, I knew little about dinosaurs. Today, I'm much more knowledgable, not because I've made a study of paleontology, but because I've been present for hundreds of spontaneous preschool conversations on the topic. Indeed, anyone who has had scores of … | Continue reading
As a boy, I would feel excitement about, say, Christmas morning or an upcoming family vacation. My heart would beat a little faster in anticipation. My thoughts would race ahead, attempting to live the moment, and all its possible permutations, before it had arrived. As the day a … | Continue reading
Since the Enlightenment, the general consensus has been that our brains essentially react to signals received via our senses and what follows is an orderly chain-reaction of emotion, reason, analysis, and decision-making, which is sent back to our bodies as commands about how to … | Continue reading
"Adolescence" was invented in the mid-1800's by the warlike Prussian nation. They had just suffered a humiliating military defeat at the hands of Napoleon and felt their downfall was due, at least in part, to their soldiers not being obedient enough. Some had even run away at the … | Continue reading
Faig Ahmed, hand-woven textile When our daughter Josephine was born, we lived in an apartment in downtown Seattle, a block away from the famed Pike Place Public Market. One of the reasons we loved living downtown was that we could walk everywhere and that included her, at first i … | Continue reading
During my first year teaching preschool, I was appalled at the amount of glue kids were squirting from our little Nancy bottles. It just seemed so wasteful. Committed to not bossing kids around, I tried using informative statements like, "That's a lot of glue," "It only takes a d … | Continue reading
I went back last night to take a look at what I wrote here on my birthday eight years ago (which was based on a post from 13 years ago when I turned 50). I'm happy to report that I still stand by (almost) every word, so I'm sharing it again today with a few edits to account for t … | Continue reading
Yesterday, a pair of crows drove our dog crazy by play fighting outside our living room window. At first I thought it was an actual fight, and maybe it was (I have no idea what was in their hearts) but after awhile it was hard to see it as anything other than a bit of rough housi … | Continue reading
In his classic book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, the man sometimes credited as the father of modern wildlife ecology, wrote, "It is the part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it." He was writing … | Continue reading
I once taught a girl named Laura who would sit with the rest of us on the rug during circle time, but when she spoke, she popped to her feet to pace back and forth. She had fresh, thoughtful contributions to make to our group discussions, but clearly needed to move as she said th … | Continue reading
I've been married to my wife Jennifer for 38 years and during that time we've shared a lot of experiences, side-by-side, the difference in our relative perspectives only a matter of degrees, yet we still regularly find ourself disagreeing about what we saw, heard, touched, tasted … | 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
Six-year-old Kaia was arrested because she got in a power struggle with a teacher over wearing sunglasses inside. Eight-year-old Evelyn was arrested because she wanted to wear a cow hoodie in class. Seven-year-old Malachi was arrested after a shoving match with another child who … | Continue reading
Everybody's had to fight to be free. ~Tom Petty The American labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller and poet Utah Phillips once said, "The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is someth … | Continue reading
The boy had shed his jacket onto the floor, leaving it in a heap right in the middle of the room. Under normal circumstances I would have said something like, "Your coat is on the floor; it belongs on a hook," then waited for him to think things through. But this was his first da … | Continue reading
Neuroscientist Patrick House asserts that "the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience." Another prominent neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio claims that the thing we call consciousness (or mind) emerged from the so-called universal emotions like fe … | Continue reading
Jean Piaget in his office The conventional wisdom is that an uncluttered classroom is best for young learners. I regularly see photos labeled as "classroom don'ts" with scads of posters and other art on the walls, things dangling from the ceilings, and materials stuffed willy-nil … | 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'm excited to announce that registration is open for my brand new 6-part course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management. The phrase "classroom management" has always bugged me. Most of the time, when people use it, they're talking about adults who have " … | Continue reading
A couple days ago, my wife and I got a hankering for shortbread. We then proceeded to eat too many shortbread cookies. They were delicious. The desire was sated . . . probably for a good long while. Not only did I spend the rest of my afternoon feeling slight queasy, but we were … | Continue reading
In Sarah Perry's picture book classic If . . ., she surprises us with illustrated responses to prompts like, "If butterflies wore clothes," "If caterpillars were toothpaste," and "If toes were teeth." Whenever we read that book I suggest that the kids might want to try their hand … | Continue reading
When children pick up the hot glue gun, many are drawn in simply by the prospect of using this oft forbidden tool. Others have made a search of the junk box and are intrigued by something they've found there. In Angie's case, she had found the plastic housing for one of my asthma … | Continue reading
I once knew a two-year-old who was terrified of pinecones. In nearly every other circumstance, he was a bold, confident child, but when he spied a pinecone he froze in fear. One day, to his horror, noticed that there were cones on the branches of a scotch pine that lived on the p … | Continue reading
Physicists assure us that despite how it seems, there is no difference between the past and the future. The math tells us it's true, even as the perspective provided by the biology of human bodies simply doesn't allow us to experience the past (except through our unreliable memor … | Continue reading