As Jewish people we are blessed with Shabbat – a day of rest, to reset your priorities, to focus on important things like family and friends, education, traditions, and legacy.
For us, as educators, we sometimes need this Shabbat – to check who we are, why are we doing this job and to ask ourselves if we are doing maximum we can, or we can make improvements. This meeting – Early Childhood Morim Program Intra European Conference – we (me and 3 more teachers from the Gan Eden kindergarten) were so lucky to be able to attend – was exactly the “Shabbat” we needed.
Thank you to two amazing educators – Mara Bier and Fran Pfeffer – we had the possibility to discuss with our fellow educators from Budapest and Sofia, not about great projects we can implement tomorrow in our Gan but about what is the essence of childhood and how we can work in partnership with the child, the parents, and our environment, using our Reggio eyeglasses.
They are special eyeglasses that help you see what is important – a beautiful artwork – that the teacher “helped” doing it – or the process through which the kids learn, discover, solve problems, debate and come up with solutions, the language they use and the relationships they build.
It is so easy to be fascinated by Pinterest – and all the wonderful things you find there – but education, in the form we know now we owe it to our kids has nothing to do with precut materials.
It’s hard to change everything you’ve been doing, and is easier to look for things that are against you – our curriculum, the paperwork we have to do, the expectations from the parents and the minister of education – but when you have clear idea about what the image of a child is, how a kid learns best and all the studies behind it, we need to find a way.
Fran and Mara told us that coming back home we will look differently at things, using our Reggio glasses, and it was true – we, as educators, for ourselves we started questioning why are we doing this activity – because it is fun, what is the message that we sending to the child, is this something they are interested in, did I even ask them. We also started to feel more comfortable in giving each other constructive criticism and trying to find solutions together, instead of defending our ideas.
It is a process but I am extremely happy that we started altogether. Especially these days when I remember that we as Jewish people – my family- had to fight for our existence, I feel it is extremely important to make sure we educate the next generation to be capable citizens, proud of their heritage, confident they can find a solution in any situation, independent and active members of their Jewish community, local, European and worldwide.
Thank you for opening our eyes and holding our hand step by step in this process!
Gan Eden team
