Supporting Children's Enthusiasms

In his book, Living Long and Living Well: Inspiring Stories of Creating and Contributing During the Wisdom Years, John Rosenow tells the story of Martha Graham and how the encouragement she received as a young child for her early interests supported her remarkable and long career in dance. Rosenow explains:

“Martha’s life is yet another tribute to the people who encourage and support childhood enthusiasms: parents, grandparents or teachers, friends or caregivers. Cultivating childhood enthusiasms often enough leads to lifetimes full of joy and wonder.”

And in the Beginnings Workshop book, Curriculum: Art, Music, Movement, Drama, Anita Rui Olds writes this about supporting a child’s need to move (something that was supported for Martha Graham): “Traditionally we have relegated children’s need for movement to outdoor spaces...This is unfortunate because children need to move all the time, both indoors and outdoors, in a multiplicity of ways…A facet of learning to read may illustrate the relationship between movement and learning. Until children have experiences orienting their bodies in space by going up, on, under, beside, inside, and in front of things, it is possible they will have difficulty dealing with letter identification and the orientation of symbols on a page.”

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