Tools can be manipulated. They can be anything. A piece of driftwood can be a little table for a doll that you’ve made. This would conserve as a building thing. So the tools are, I think, mostly from nature. Very often it’s pieces of bamboo, pieces of wood, shovels are tools. Rubber mallets are tools. Stumps are tools. We can move stumps and then we can step on them. We can use our imagination. Things can become other things. The trouble with the toys there’s usually only one way to use them. I don’t see any value in that at all.
Things to think about
How many things in your classroom come from nature?
Do you have several of the same tools for children?
Do you have lots of clay in your program?
What other items do you bring to the children that can be changed?
Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce
A number of years ago, research emerged describing how different the state of reality is for children in terms of brainwave frequencies—Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta and Gamma—and for adults. We are so enchanted by the virtual reality between our ears that we faintly recognize that the state of our brain plays a profound role in what we experience. Every morning we reach for that double espresso to kickstart us from our dreamy, almost-awake state to another. Imagine spending all day in the twilight between being awake and dreaming. That is the reality the early child lives in. Beta (14-40Hz) brainwaves are associated with normal waking consciousness and a heightened state of alertness, logic and critical reasoning. Alpha (7.5-14Hz), the deep relaxation wave, is when we are in a state of physical and mental relaxation but still aware of what is happening; its frequency is around 7 to 13 pulses per second. Theta (4-7.5Hz), are present during deep meditation and light sleep, including REM dream states. It is the realm of the subconscious and is generally experienced as you drift off to sleep (from Alpha) and wake from sleep (from Delta). Delta (0.5-4Hz), the deep sleep state, is the slowest of the frequencies experienced in deep, dreamless sleep and in very deep meditation where awareness is fully detached. Gamma (above 40Hz), newly discovered, is the insight wave and is the fastest frequency at or above 40Hz associated with bursts of insight and high-level information processing.
Guess which state newborns and children up to age two live in? Delta, the realm of the unconscious, gateway to the universal and the collective unconscious, where the impressions received are generally not available to our waking consciousness. Montessori described the “absorbent mind” of the early child. “Unquestioned acceptance of the given” was Piaget’s term. Adults are usually in Beta, our normal waking consciousness. The early child is in Delta. In adult terms, it is as if the early child lives in a hypnotic trance of heightened suggestibility. Analysis and reasoning, which our directives imply, don’t register. The child of the dream is absorbing, without question, experiences directly into his or her vast subconscious mind, which represents 90 to 95 percent of our total brain-mind activity, whereas active analysis and reasoning, our normal adult state, represents only 5 to 10 percent of our brain-mind activity. What is called “the terrible two’s” is, to a large extent, the frustration that comes from the radical disconnect between the state of the child of the dream and our adult reality. This child of the dream disconnect continues up to age five and six.