Children Create Learning Opportunities

I often say children are little learning machines. You really don’t have to tell any child that learning is a good idea. They know that. They spend all their time and energy on the task of learning. As I was walking through the toddler yard the other day I saw a fantastic example of this that contains important feedback for teachers and parents.

One of our older toddlers who turned two a few months ago was playing with bikes. He has mastered riding the toddler bikes and now needs new challenges. Teachers have worked hard to keep offering this child challenges to master. But they do not carry this responsibility alone. The child is right in there with them!

As we watched this child create a new vehicle by piling one bike on top of another and then proceed to discover how to ride and maneuver this new bike, we marveled as his drive to find appropriate developmental challenges on his own. A teacher or parent might be tempted to tell this little boy that we don’t use the bikes this way. That comment might be motivated by an adult desire to help children learn to follow rules and/or stay safe. In this instance (although of course, not in all instances) that would have been a bad move. It would have interrupted his genuine and effective attempts to continue his learning. When we are tempted to stop a child, we should always stop for a moment and carefully assess the benefits the child is deriving from what he/she is doing before we interrupt.

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