A Helping Community

Thank you all for your support, motivation, and openness of sharing your personal stories.

Let us all continue to change and touch as many lives as we can. Make a different!

We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

Educating the Whole Child

Classrooms should be a place of caring, understanding and creativity not an environment that is filled with fear and conformity. Holistic education and Montessori teaching methods are classical examples of theories of teaching that promote fostering the whole child.

Both here in the US and in other countries such as India, educational thinkers have stressed the necessity to gear education to the whole child.

Schools are becoming more focused on educating the whole child, not only meeting student’s intellectual needs. Teaching the whole child  promotes the development of healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged children. In today’s world, children must be able to think critically and communicate well with all types of people, in addition to learning the basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills we typically associate with school. It  also focuses on a child’s feelings of safety, self-worth, and ability to respect others.

 Teaching models such as Montessori, for years has focused on meeting just not a child’s educational needs but most importantly actively engaging them in the learning process. The Montessori Method of education combines a philosophy of freedom and self-development for children within a structured setting. When learning occurs in this type of environment, it helps the child grow intellectually, physically, emotionally/mentally, and socially, into a complete person, preparing each student for each successive developmental phase, allowing them to take responsibility for their own education making choices, changing and becoming unique human beings. Simply teaching a new set of ideas is not enough unless the emotional, behavioral and spiritual aspects of these ideas are addressed in the student’s life.

Holistic education is based on the premise that each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to spiritual values such as compassion and peace. Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning. This is done, not through an academic "curriculum" that condenses the world into instructional packages, but through direct engagement with the environment.

 Providing a learning community in which our children can be healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged is what a whole child approach to learning, teaching, and community engagement really is. Educating and fostering the whole child will develop and prepare students for the challenges and opportunities of today and tomorrow.

References

Http://www.pathsofleearning.net

http://www.newglobaled.org/whole_child_education.html