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Learning at home without spending a dime

Sticks, sticks and stones and elephant bones is one of the things we talk about.  This is what I think about this kind of stuff, the more you do it the more you know how to do it.  You start with just rocks.  You say okay, now what else could I get and you just find yourself looking at the world differently.  You look at clay pots, oh that could be turned upside down, that could be used as a bridge if I have two of those.  See I think you get better and better and better at it.

Things to think about

Can you make a commitment to bringing more things to the children that don’t cost any money/
What in your space do kids spend lots of time using?
What things in your current space could be passed on to a thrift store?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

One of the things that Alan Shore, PhD., points out is that constant curtailment of the child’s own spontaneous interaction with the world does bring about very specific shifts and changes in the neural patterning of the brain. those early neural structures of the brain are experience dependent. the environment shapes how DNA spells out instructions to the whole system, how to build neural structures in the brain. We find that the child’s ability to interact with society is then curtailed by the curtailment of the neural structures involved. a negative response from the environment, that means largely the parent, family or immediate surroundings, is a threat to be cut off and abandoned. So you get the brain adapting in a totally different way to a harsh competitive anxiety ridden environment then a brain’s response to a nurturing protective environment. If this happens in utero or the early years those patterns for relating to the world are locked in. Many developmentalists say they’re immutable. We do know they can be changed later but at a tremendous price. the first three years of life is the most critical time of all. Why? Because the neural patterns that form are in relation to the kind of environment the child is experiencing. reward/punishment clouds or overshadows everything else once it is established. Alan Shore noted that every nine minutes the child receives a harsh negative prohibition from his caregiver or parent or family and later on from his teachers. “No.” “Don’t.” “Do that and you’ll get clobbered.” “You’ll suffer the consequences.” They’re hit with this at every turn. That keeps them locked into their survival modes. It prevents the development of the higher evolutionary structures of mind and prevents full growth of the neural structure itself. Joseph Chilton Pearce

I think what parents needs to do at home is to just make up their mind not to spend a dime for a while.  Get a pile of rocks.  One of the things that happened to me is, in a workshop I show that we do rocks and stumps in the block area and somebody said, “Bev, where do you find rocks?”  Well most of the earth is rock.  So people don’t have a sense of that but it’s just a pile of rocks for your kid.  Watch what they do with it.  Watch how they move them around.  Watch how they play with them.  Sticks, sticks and stones and elephant bones is one of the things we talk about.

This is what I think about this kind of stuff, the more you do it the more you know how to do it.  You start with just rocks.  You say okay, now what else could I get and you just find yourself looking at the world differently.  You look at clay pots, oh that could be turned upside down, that could be used as a bridge if I have two of those.  See I think you get better and better and better at it.  I wasn’t always that good.  I think for a while I got kind of hooked into all the new early childhood things that came out.  When I first started there wasn’t any of that stuff and maybe I thought the school was a little bereft of those kinds of things.  And of course we’ve gone all the way back to doing that again.

But I don’t know that I understood it that well in the beginning but when I watched I knew that these kids were playing with this stuff.  You’ve got to pay attention to what kids really like.  And there is something really primal about things that come from nature.  So you look for acorns.  You go outside, I tell my friends, go outside, look under trees.  Find acorns.  Those kinds of things.  You’ll find yourself getting better and better and better at it.  The natural materials that are available.