Why this blog?

"... Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ... Do not search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Letters to a Young Artist, R. M. Rilke

Rooted in the promise and challenge of growth ...

these are letters from a young teacher.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Two-year-old woodpeckers

Whenever I substitute in the two-year-old classroom, I know that I will get to observe another animal in action. Each day, the children decide to play a different animal, with the same children playing the mamas, and the same children playing the babies. Today: woodpeckers.


"These are gonna be good eggs to hatch."


"Can I get buried? Put some more on me."


"She's hatching!"


"The egg cracked - boom, boom - and I hatched! Crack! Boom!"


The mama and baby woodpeckers fly around the classroom.

The remarkable thing to observe during this play was that they went through the same process over and over: burying the babies into their eggs, letting them hatch, then flying around the classroom, and back to the next to put the babies back in their eggs.

You see this often in children's play: a pattern or routine repeated over and over until it borders on ritual. This makes sense when I recall what I've read of Kieran Egan and learned at the Imaginative Education Workshop this past summer. He considers this phase of life (2-6 years old) comparable to how humans were thinking when they were dominantly an oral language culture - having developed language, but not yet the abstract symbols of writing. During this stage, one of the cognitive tools children are using (says Egan) are patterns and rhythms. Other cognitive tools of this stage are binary opposites (good/evil, etc), metaphor and image-making, mystery, and dramatics.

When I watch the kids engaging in this kind of play, and think about what they are thinking, underneath it all, I wonder if this is the time of life when we are captured by the essence of things: what makes woodpeckers woodpeckers, what makes the world what it is, and what makes each of us who we are.


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