Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/when-great-minds-dream-together/5022567/
My first experience with the program that became the Marie Shaw Dunn Child Development Center at Northwestern State University (NSU) was as a graduate student taking classes for kindergarten certification. Following a visit to the center, the instructor made some statements that resonate with me still today, greatly influencing my philosophy on working with young children.
“How does a child learn about an orange?” she asked us, passing around several oranges for us to explore to make her point. We handled oranges, examining the rough texture, and smelled them — even tossing one to each other. Our instructor followed up on the experience by explaining how we understood the concept of orange, not from a worksheet or coloring book page, but by our firsthand experiences of handling, smelling, and tasting, and exploring the orange with our senses. “Only then,” she explained, “does a young child truly understand the concept of orange. And without that experience, the word orange (she wrote on the chalkboard) has no meaning!”
Today, I rarely eat an orange without that influential lesson replaying in my memory.
A String of “Firsts”
The center began as a nursery school in 1935, the first laboratory nursery school for ...