This 18 month-old is chopping mushrooms for a quiche. What a gift: the concentration, hand-eye coordination, the real, practical activity for accomplishing her immediate goal (the chopped mushrooms) and the value of an ultimate purpose of service (contributing to the quiche she and her family will share at dinner).
Another fabulous opportunity to turn things around, to calm and cure the violence. If we can just hold back those afflicted with the reflex of hate long enough, here’s another way to work forward – a whole collaborative project between Yale and UNICEF that is using Montessori principles to address the seeds of violence that we know are sown in the family. Read more »
Children in charge of the laundry for their classroom community were waiting for the completion of the dryer cycle so they sat down in the office to wait. One child picked up the displayed copy of the new French translation of my book, “Children Who Are Not Yet Peaceful.” Read more »
By the way, I’ve read Children Who Are Not Yet Peaceful three times on my own, and our faculty studied it twice for our book study. What a tremendous gift — THANK YOU! Read more »
It all matters, supporting the wholeness of the child matters. The emotional wellbeing, expressive abilities, and cognitive development all matter. Read more »
Wonderful for children to grow up experiencing the many splendored forms of “real” – the concrete, the simbólico, the metaphorical; the real of dreams, of poetry, of myth, of imagination, of literature, of pretend (which, yes, is its own kind of reality)! Read more »
Even though we are intensively trained at length in an organic system formed of an integrated and cohesive philosophy, psychology, and practice, capable of growing as a living whole, it cannot take life until we breathe into it the soul of our own transformation. Read more »
From cooing and going onward to babbling and then forward to full speech; from random sprinklings of periods onward to interspersions of varied punctuation marks and then forward to full punctuation! Read more »
Donna Bryant Goertz’ Children Who Are Not Yet Peaceful is more than a book about children. It is more than a book about those who teach children. Read more »