The Four A-s in Moments

SpeEdChange.at.Medium

One thing I’ve learned over my lifetime is that children do not often learn when we teach them, they learn from their interactions with us. Kids don’t learn to walk because we teach them, they learn to walk in order to imitate those around them. Kids don’t learn to talk — to speak our language — because we teach them, they learn to do that because they are frustrated by our inability to understand what they are saying. Kids don’t learn math because we teach them, they truly only learn math when they see how math helps us understand our world. And kids don’t learn to bully because we teach them, they learn to bully from watching all the ways we devalue ‘other’ people.

“a new study of Australian preschoolers and Kalahari Bushman children finds that a particular kind of imitation — over-imitation, in which a child copies everything an adult shows them, not just the steps that lead to some outcome — appears to be a universal human activity.” Grace Point Community Church

Children watch everything in their environment, hear everything, taste everything, smell everything, feel everything, and everything we do or don’t do teaches them. When we understand that we know that kids don’t need classroom chairs, or honor rolls, or grades, or spelling tests, or bells telling then when to move. What they do need is for us to model the behaviors…