How do you make space for a windstorm in the classroom?

Furniture is being shoved out of the way as a child moves through the daycare. He pushes a table up against the toy fridge and stove, knocking over the two wooden chairs with his hands, and tipping over the child size coffee table. He runs back across the room to the entrance door then returns with his arms held out at his sides zig zaging slightly saying quietly, "I am the windstorm." Shoving a plastic chair with metal feet across the floor creates a scraping sound. "I see you are the wind but when you push the chair across the floor it is making scratches." He stops and looks at the floor and turns back to the table and crawls under it informing his friend, "There is a windstorm come hide." The friend crawls under. I comment, "I see there has been a lot of damage. Who is going to fix thing and put them back together." As he picks up a cake pan, "This is a drill," holding it up to the toy fridge, "brrrr."

What looked like random crashing through the daycare causing destruction with out thought was actually a very complicated dramatic play involving weather. We have been having big winds lately. We have been pointing out the different kinds of weather we experience during the Fall and Winter. We have been taking about weather words and printing them out. We have made playing in the rain enticing by making the outdoors a big water sensory experience. Can we really shut down a child who has found a way to incorporate weather into the dramatic play? And when we actually look closely at how the child is moving his body and the furniture we can see that he is actually moving purposely and with much control. He did not slam the chairs over he tipped them slowly. When he shoved the table up against the fridge and stove he did not crash it. When I commented that the chair was scratching the floor he stopped and redirected his play. He also took my comment about who was going to fix the damage and incorporated it into his play. Very little redirection was needed to keep the play from becoming out of control. Play is often messy, loud, and needs to be.

Brain Based Learning

With preschool kids the balance practice is easy to incorporate. I love brain science. I want to help build big brains that work at top efficiency. Early intervention is important. But no brain is hopeless, every brain can learn. It might just take a little more time an a lot of patience but learning will happen. No one should lose the joy of discovery. If they do it is our job as educators to help them find it.

Thinking about being a Mentor: Cultivating curiosity

#1: Curiosity come first: Getting adults to remain curios. Inspiring co-workers to dive into the wonder of why.

#2: Embrace the mess: Face it even as a sophisticated grown up learning new things is messy, we will get to wrong, we will stumble and in those stumbles we learn. IT IS O.K. to get it wrong. I say this to the children all the time. I am mindful to say it to my co-workers.

#3: Practice Reflection: In making the messes and the mistakes we get to rethink, redo, and move forward to the next what if and why. In being a mentor we need to show our work, bring our messy thinking out into the light so that we can show our peers that we don't always have our shit together. We have just learned to stumble with some grace.