AEON Issue Fourteen December 2021
PRESCHOOL
The Young Child’s Needs of Relating and Connecting Relating and connecting are core human needs and as early childhood educators we understand and nurture the children through living into their world of experience to truly meet them. They live in a world of imagination. They are car drivers or bakers, a family sleeping in bunk beds or a child lost in the world of a silkworm.
A
t Preschool we aim to safeguard the children’s unified participatory consciousness and nurture the connection of the children to Nature, to rhythms of life and to family. At the same time, we build new connections to teachers and friends and the wider Preschool community. The teachers seek to develop deeper ways of connecting and relating which they model for the children. At first it is a shared hug and a smile when they arrive that begins to build connection, later the children run up to call their friends to a new game or tell them of the news of the morning. True connecting is a balanced interaction of giving and receiving, of speaking and listening, of offering PAGE
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and awaiting response, of sounding and silence. It is empathy for the other, being able to stand in their shoes, as well as being able to transmit to the other what is your own experience, what is the content of your inner life. The teachers meet regularly and share pictures of the children and insights into their wonderful individual gifts as we reflect on standing in their shoes. Peggy Day Preschool Director
“There is not yet an experience of a difference between self and other for the young child.” Educating the Will by Stephen Spitalny
