"Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how." -John Holt
After spending a couple of days in Grandma Donna's pool, Gabriel was ready to ditch the bubble and give his fish legs a go. He jumped in the deep end and never stopped swimming! Really & truly swimming.
I was pretty sure he could do it but it's hard to judge in our shallow pool where you can always touch the floor when you need to. But in the deep pool he swam above the water, below the water, swam to the bottom (8 feet deep!) and back to the shallow end. Once his mask even slipped off and he came up a little shocked but still kept swimming!
He was very proud of himself and strutted his stuff the rest of the day. :)
"By nature people are learning animals. Birds fly; fish swim; humans think and learn. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do - and all we need to do - is to give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest."
John Holt
"In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it...and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself." -Grace Llewellyn
"What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child."
George Bernard Shaw
Real, natural learning is in the living. It's in the observing, the questioning, the examining, the pondering, the analyzing, the watching, the reading, the DO-ing, the living, the breathing, the loving, the JOY. It's in the joy. ~Anne Ohman
"How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?" -Henry D. Thoreau
1 comment:
Elijah and Sadie started swimming like fishies this summer too! Awesome to watch- and to think we didn't even have to pay someone to torture/scare them into it. Imagine...
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