"Octograbbers" was a game that the children played for months on end. It involved possessing two shovels, one for each hand, then using them like pincers to dig, pick things up, and occasionally, in the spirit of fun, menace one another.  We'll never know who invented the game of "octograbbers," but we can be pretty certain that it didn't emerge from Darwinian evolution. Or rather, not directly. It's not one of those things like walking or talking for which most human's are born with the biological programming. Octograbbers was what could be called a cultural phenomenon, one that ..read more

I know the secret to making your dreams come true. In an essay written for New Philosopher magazine (content not available online), Oliver Burkman discusses what's called Littlewood's Law, named for a British mathematician by the name of John Edensor Littlewood: Let's suppose . . . that you're awake and active in the world -- as opposed to sleeping or resting -- for a mere eight hours a day. Suppose furthermore that a tiny 'event' of some sort occurs at the rate of once per second during those hours: you see someone in the street, you read or hear a sentence, or have a th ..read more

When I talk to adults about their years of schooling, they rarely talk about what they learned in math class. They talk about teachers. They talk about their social life. And at some point almost all of them talk about the boredom.  Boredom researcher John Eastwood from York University in Canada defines boredom as "The aversive experience of wanting, but being unable to engage in satisfying activity." He and others have found that boredom is linked to, and in some circumstances potentially the cause of, depression and anger, pathological gambling, bad driving, sensation see ..read more

Most of us want to raise children who are ethical and caring. Indeed, when surveyed 96 percent of us say that this is a "very important, if not essential" parenting goal. I've not seen the numbers for teachers, but I would assume that a super majority of us feel likewise. If nothing else, we want the future to be populated with adults of character and we believe it begins with us, the adults responsible for the rearing and education of children. Unfortunately, a full 80 percent of youth surveyed say that they are more concerned with "achievement" or "happiness" than with caring ..read more

The three girls were in a sort of irritable stew. They were bickering with one another like it was a stereotypical family holiday dinner, moping, whining, and fussing. Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not . . . Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If s ..read more

A while back, I was chatting with an artist, a painter, at her studio and gallery, discussing her process. I always ask artists about their process because I'm forever trying to steal their ideas and figure out how to convert them into preschool art explorations. When I told her I'm a preschool teacher, I added, "All our art is process art. It's really just science." And she replied, 'That's how every artist approaches their work. We're all scientists." Whether an educator, parent, or just, you know, a human being, it pays to be curious about process. For instance, some time ago, I ..read more

Paleontologists now think that animal life first evolved on our planet 789 million years ago, although as the research continues it's likely that this oddly specific number will be supplanted. As most of us are aware, it was some time later than animals began to appear on land in the form of ancient "millipede." We currently believe that those early pioneers dragged themselves from their watery home more than 420 million years ago and there has been life on land ever since. I like to think about the first animal to brave the land. What was it doing? Was it looking for food? Maybe ..read more

Like many modern parents, I'd not spent a lot of time around young children, as an adult, until our daughter was born. When she was two, we enrolled in a cooperative preschool, which for those who don't know, is a model in which parents attend alongside their children and serve as assistant teachers. This was my introduction, or re-introduction, to early childhood. Of course, I had memories of my own childhood, but precious few, if any, from before I was four or five. So, when I remembered childhood, it was from the perspective of an older child, and many of those memories involved r ..read more

A friend who works with young children recently texted me with questions about why I thought kids today seem more anxious than in the past. There are a lot of theories. Some blame screen-based technology, especially smartphones. Some blame the media. Some blame bad parenting. Some environmental toxins. Some blame a society that has gone off the rails. One of the most credible theories, however, is that our children are suffering from a deficit of good, old-fashioned play, and anxiousness is a symptom. Most of the leading thinkers on play (e.g., Peter Gray, Jonathan Haight ..read more

Charlotte was one of those kids who had been coming to Woodland Park since before she was born, arriving first in our classroom in utero to drop off and pick up her older brother, then continuing on her own behalf until she was five. If I've ever known a student, it would be Charlotte, and among the many things I know is that she is not conflict averse: she will stand up for herself, and for righteousness in general, like few people I've ever known, whatever their age. To say she knew her way around the place would be an understatement. When we began making our cl ..read more