WHY?

I find that the more I let go, the more authentic our program becomes. The more I am in tune with what the children need.. 
what each individual child needs. I am not bogged down by unnecessary rules and ways of doing things that are born out of tradition.. repeated time and time again with no connection to the WHY. 

It wasn't until I began asking  myself WHY? Why do all of the children have to eat when I say they should be hungry. WHY do  children who no longer need a nap have to sleep, why do they have to suppress their natural urge to throw things, to dump and pour things, to transport things from place to place, to collect and compile large piles of things. WHY? 

After reflection I came to the conclusion that those rules were more about me, they were born out of convenience and outright laziness.  I don't beat myself up about it because those "rules" were handed down to me, it was just "what we have always done". I do beat myself up for taking so long to ask the question WHY? 

As I continue to ask WHY and to question everything we do with and for the children in our program, I began to reformulate the ways that we work with the children in our program. We pay close attention to the individual needs of the children we spend our days with. In doing so we've noticed that one child needed to eat a late lunch. He was not hungry as early as many of the other children. He was not eating, he was picking at his lunch and then declining to eat much at all. 

We began to watch for signs that he was hungry and noticed that in fact, he needed to eat much later. His eating time overlapped with the time he would be napping. In a rigid classroom will a broad stroke set of "rules" this child would not be accommodated. In a program that is in tune with the children and has committed to ensuring that their individual needs were met, he was permitted to eat at a time that his body needed to eat. He ate EVERY DROP of his food and promptly fell asleep right after. 

It is the responsibility of early educators to be well-versed in the latest research on child development and to design programs accordingly, merely continuing traditions and following standards that totally disregard what we know about children and how they learn is not conducive of providing a quality early childhood education. 

As early educators, we have a responsibility to ask the question WHY? Ask parents, ask administrators, ask policy makers, and ask fellow early childhood educators.  It is in answering this question that we build authentic child-centered programs. 

WHY is a question best answered by doing the work.. the research is there and in this age of the internet every educator, parent, and policy maker has a responsibility to inform themselves and construct developmentally appropriate programs. WHY??... WHY NOT?? 

-Lakisha Reid 
Owner/Educator 
Discovery Early Learning Center 
www.facebook.com/Discoveryearlylearning