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Jim Greenman, the author of Exchange's best selling book Caring Spaces, Learning Places, shared these thoughts on the importance of comfort in early childhood settings in his Exchange (November 2007) article, "Places to Live: Important Dimensions of Child Care Settings":

"It was a spotless classroom: gleaming tile floors, and shiny tables and chairs. It might have been a great playroom or school for a few hours, but a place for all day, all week, all year living? Something was missing, something important. When the children were gone, there was no imprint, none of the general residue or artifacts of lived lives. The care and the education were there, but it was a place devoid of feeling, character, or real warmth.

"Comfort is not the enemy of serious early childhood education. Most of us want comfort from the places where we live. We need pliability, responsiveness in our furnishings and the people we are with, and some freedom. We may need to sprawl, slouch, or collapse for a while. The strains and tensions of everyday life may be made manageable by a stretch on a couch, cuddling with a child or lover, or simply a few moments of silence in an easy chair. The ability to make an imprint on a setting where one spends up to ten hours a day for a number of years is important in the development of self-esteem. Young children, more recent womb-dwellers than we are and native sensualists, operate in a world dominated more by sensory impression than by mind and language — they sense the world.

"Children need a place where they have full use of their bodies and senses and enough freedom to take advantage of the variety of life, where they can find or invent the spaces they need, and have places and moments in time to pause and recharge.

"But remember, comfort is subjective, and like everything else, culture bound. It has to do with our own sense of softness, responsiveness, familiarity, and a reasonable level of sensory stimulation — neither too much nor too little, that leads to a sense of calm."

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Jim Greenman has distilled his great thinking on designing learning spaces in early childhood programs in his best-selling Exchange guidebook, Caring Spaces, Learning Places — Children's Environments that Work. This week, Caring Spaces is on sale at a 20% discount on the Exchange web site.

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