"Our vision is to create inquisitive and passionate problem solvers by teaching the whole child to become positive contributors to our community."
Today, I'd like to write about a small way that I'm teaching the whole child.
I often think about a scene from a cartoon movie several years ago where all the humans had become large sloths and would move around in automatic chairs. They wouldn't ever have to actually walk anywhere, making them little more than flesh covered robots who were moved around by machines to complete tasks that needed a special human touch. Everything was automatically dispensed, automatically fed to them, and not a single moment of creativity or self-expression was happening. They even all wore the same clothes, because it was easier for a machine to pick out their clothes than for them to do wardrobe selection each day!
I worry about my students turning into these flesh robots. I know my realistic picture needs to be that we could never actually have a society of people who are moved around by machines and fed automatically.
There are simply too many fad diets (and people looking to make fast money) for that to actually happen.
I was facilitating a game with my students this afternoon called Hop Old Squirrel where there is a bunch of running and pairing up of students, and there's always one student left without a partner and they have to take another job (think musical chairs, without chairs or sitting. So, not musical chairs, really. Just the elimination component of musical chairs. But much much much more kind and civil.).
They were laughing, smiling, singing, and being given the opportunity to simply be kids (and experience all the music objectives we were covering, of course!). I thought about that robot scene from the animated movie and realized that I'm doing my part to make sure that they're not turning into robots. They were being given the experience of positive feelings and connections with peers, and to me that's a HUGE part of teaching the whole child. Teaching the whole child is way more than dropping them into an art, music, or PE class; it's giving them the human experience. Erasing the robot box that we so often have to fit them into with reading assessments and clear evidence of learning.
This post reminded me of this quote from Albert Einstein (the art teacher and I love this quote so much!):
I love teaching elementary music because Stout Nation is a working laboratory for teaching the Whole Child. We're working on music literacy, we're dissecting and creating math patterns, we're tearing apart forms of poetry and connecting them together again, we're experiencing science through the vibrations in our bodies, we're developing technology skills, but most of all...
we are being children.
And we are climbing trees. And being fish. And hopping like old squirrels. And transforming into whatever we want to be (as long as it's not a flesh covered robot. Because, gross.).