YES! Young Brains Do Need Play

Regarding the Early Years, Charlotte Mason says of parents: "To form in his child right habits of thinking and behaving is a parent's chief duty...To nourish a child daily with loving, right, and noble ideas we believe to be the parent's next duty" ( Vol. 2, p. 228).

Contrary to the current performance-based, "the-earlier-the-better mentality," Mason also advocated postponing formal school lessons until the child is six.

"We (of the P.N.E.U) begin the definite 'school' education of children when they are six; they are no doubt capable of beginning a year or two earlier but the fact is that nature and circumstances have provided such a wide field of educaiton for young children that it seems better to abstain from requiring direct intellectual efforts until they have arrived at that age" (Vol.6, p.159).

New research is confirming what Charlotte Mason said 140 years ago,  that "it takes six years of ideal conditions where a child gives his heart to his parents."

Read more here:
"Young Brains Need Play; Preschoolers Learn Best While Having Fun."

This philosophy is why in my preschool class I provide numerous activities and experiences designed to help children explore and discover the world around them using all their senses.

Love the One You've Got

let the children play is one of my favorite new blogs.

This morning on Facebook, they posted something I just had to share:

"Motherhood is about raising and celebrating the child you have, not the child you thought you would have. It's about understanding that he is exactly the person he is supposed to be. And that, if you're lucky, he just might be the teacher that turns you into the person you are supposed to be." 

Yesssss!

The Mind of the Child is 'Good Ground.'––Their keen sensitiveness to spiritual influences is not due to ignorance on the part of the children. It is we, not they, who are in error. The whole tendency of modern biological thought is to confirm the teaching of the Bible: the ideas which quicken come from above; the mind of the little child is an open field, surely 'good ground,' where, morning by morning, the sower goes forth to sow, and the seed is the Word. All our teaching of children should be given reverently, with the humble sense that we are invited in this matter to co-operate with the Holy Spirit; but it should be given dutifully and diligently, with the awful sense that our co-operation would appear to be made a condition of the Divine action; that the Saviour of the world pleads with us to 'suffer the little children to come unto Me,' as if we had the power to hinder, as we know that we have.

Exerpt from Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason. p. 48