http://www.whoaphotos.com/blog/2007/07/12/apples-and-onions-week-two/ Liberate! Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:02:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 http://www.whoaphotos.com/blog/2007/07/12/apples-and-onions-week-two/#comment-41621 » Summer Wrap-Up, Philosophical Style Tue, 28 Aug 2007 18:55:33 +0000 http://www.whoaphotos.com/blog/?p=180#comment-41621 [...] Rose: My Rose for the whole summer is hard to pick. I’m not even sure if I should go with one of those beautiful little vignettes that captures a small moment but symbolizes a lot, or if I should try to explain the overall sense of fabulousness I felt this summer. This Apple from Week Two was definitely one of the overall high points. I learned a lot this summer about how to interact with kids as people, rather than as kids. Not sure if that makes sense to people who don’t already work with kids. But there is such a magical thing that happens for me when I treat kids as peers. They act like peers. And in many cases, they know more than I do about whatever we’re doing anyway. Kids who have been to four years of WAS camps are probably better at making friction fires than I am, and they are possibly better at finding berries, and they usually know a plant or two that I don’t know, and they are almost certainly better than me at catching snakes. Since these are all things that I would like to be better at, it’s easy to approach them as the experts, and this seems to be something that they don’t get much in the rest of their lives. If I recall correctly, childhood involves dealing with a long line of ignorant and condescending adults. So when I left the kids in charge of their own experiences, extraordinary things happened. Like when a whole group of 11 kids decided that they wanted to see how silently they could walk down a trail. We spaced out so we were just out of sight from each other and foxwalked for a solid 20 minutes. (These kids were ages 10 and 11…can you imagine eleven 10-year old kids being silent in the woods for 20 minutes by their own choice!?) They were so silent that a winter wren 5 feet off the trail was still singing by the time I, at the end of the line, meandered past. In that same group, two kids saw a weasel at different times. And at the end of the week the whole group witnessed a bird alarm traveling through a blackberry thicket, culminating in the last two kids in line seeing the bobcat emerge from the end of the thicket. And they all knew what the bird alarm was without me saying anything. [...] […] Rose: My Rose for the whole summer is hard to pick. I’m not even sure if I should go with one of those beautiful little vignettes that captures a small moment but symbolizes a lot, or if I should try to explain the overall sense of fabulousness I felt this summer. This Apple from Week Two was definitely one of the overall high points. I learned a lot this summer about how to interact with kids as people, rather than as kids. Not sure if that makes sense to people who don’t already work with kids. But there is such a magical thing that happens for me when I treat kids as peers. They act like peers. And in many cases, they know more than I do about whatever we’re doing anyway. Kids who have been to four years of WAS camps are probably better at making friction fires than I am, and they are possibly better at finding berries, and they usually know a plant or two that I don’t know, and they are almost certainly better than me at catching snakes. Since these are all things that I would like to be better at, it’s easy to approach them as the experts, and this seems to be something that they don’t get much in the rest of their lives. If I recall correctly, childhood involves dealing with a long line of ignorant and condescending adults. So when I left the kids in charge of their own experiences, extraordinary things happened. Like when a whole group of 11 kids decided that they wanted to see how silently they could walk down a trail. We spaced out so we were just out of sight from each other and foxwalked for a solid 20 minutes. (These kids were ages 10 and 11…can you imagine eleven 10-year old kids being silent in the woods for 20 minutes by their own choice!?) They were so silent that a winter wren 5 feet off the trail was still singing by the time I, at the end of the line, meandered past. In that same group, two kids saw a weasel at different times. And at the end of the week the whole group witnessed a bird alarm traveling through a blackberry thicket, culminating in the last two kids in line seeing the bobcat emerge from the end of the thicket. And they all knew what the bird alarm was without me saying anything. […]

]]> http://www.whoaphotos.com/blog/2007/07/12/apples-and-onions-week-two/#comment-28683 Sarah Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:31:19 +0000 http://www.whoaphotos.com/blog/?p=180#comment-28683 It all sounds like so much fun. I want to be in your group! It all sounds like so much fun. I want to be in your group!

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