Learning is Messy!

My favorite part about The Child Development Co-op is how we allow our kids to actually be kids when they learn. I wanted to just take a minute (or a few lines anyway) to talk about how we learn here at the Co-op. Learning is messy, but it is how children grow. If you don’t ever allow a child to eat with a fork by themselves, then they will never learn to really eat autonomously. If you never allow a wobbler to pick up a paintbrush for fear of mess, then they will never appreciate how amazing it is to pass a brush across a piece of paper, or paperplate, or scrap of paper with a big ol’ glob of bright blue paint with a whole bunch of glitter mixed in!

We want to encourage creativity in our children, while allowing them to be successful in what they do. Teacher assisted, community oriented, child guided activities are what we live for. An example of some super fantastic, whole learning was trying to find something, ANYTHING to fit into the letter U, animal, and the habitats–jungle, forest, or zoo as that is the focus for January. Do you know how hard it is to find something that goes with U and is an animal?!@!#

Somehow paint seems to get on her face everytime!

So I consulted our families and one of our Co-op dads suggested an Umbrella bird! Check it out! It is for real. One of our teachers recently realized that the kids weren’t great at shaking the cinnamon/glitter container when making said bird’s fancy hairdoo. (Obviously if we are going to have some sort of fabulous bird, we need glitter!) This realization became a lesson in fine motor control for the whole school. We have since discovered, according to our own children’s direction, that our focus should be on activities surrounding hand-eye coordination and finger dexterity. The little ones have worked on free association techniques and glitter container shaking, while the middle age kids are learning what the letter U looks like while working on projects that glue feathers, and my oldest kids are now being taught the letter Uu and the alphabet, using sign language as this is a great way to exercise those tiny fingers and practice dexterity. If we would have just stuck to our plan without consulting the actual learning of our kids involved, we would have never allowed them to get messy and never realized where their learning needs were.