Nothing Without Joy: The Role of Play, Curiosity, and Wonder in the Classroom.
You only need to spend five minutes with a group of five-year-olds to realize that they are natural explorers, questioners (look up the statistics for how many questions a day a child that age asks!), and storytellers with an innate sense of wonder. The world is big, and they are eager to find out more and make sense of it. In an article I recently read about asking beautiful questions (link at the end), it quotes Neil Postman as saying, “ Children enter school as question marks and leave schools as periods .” This is perhaps one of the saddest statements I’ve read about education in awhile. There have been countless studies conducted about the role of play, wonder, and questions in education. In spite of the research support, however, so much of education falls into the “one size” fits all trap of standardization. Although there is a shift towards critical, creative thinking, it is not complete or fully embraced yet within the structure of education as a whole or ref...