Letting Kids Be Kids

“No matter how old you get, may you always stop to fill your pockets with smooth stones, empty snail shells & other little treasures.”

What was your childhood like?

Hopefully, it was much like the quotation above; hopefully it still is.

There is value in wonder.  There is value in exploration.  There is value in unanswered questions, the value being in the questions themselves. 

We are explorers by our very nature. How else do you explain the need to “Go West, young man?” To boldly go where no man has gone before? borrowing from James Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, and to paraphrase, to boldly experience life as the wonder that it is and not some video game version of it?

Some of this writer’s fondest memories are of trips, with my parents, to the mountains, to the ocean, to the rivers and through the forests. From those trips I saw the wonder in my parents’ eyes, which transformed my vision of life, so that when I got older, hiking the mountains, swimming the lakes, feeling the river’s current against my legs, watching fireflies dance in the night’s darkness, hearing the owls converse from my tent at night, they were all food for my soul and a comfort when life presented challenges.

It was a different time back then, less technology, more need to “invent” activities, and more often than not, those activities involved splashing in puddles, laying in the shade of a willow tree on a hot day, imagining shapes formed by clouds, skipping stones on the smooth surface of a local lake, and drawing, crudely I might add, paintings of creatures seen during an adventure.

I don’t remember being bored as a child; surely my memory is sugarcoated, for all children must, some days, say “I’m bored” to their mothers and ask her what they should do, but I don’t recollect that. What I do recollect is wishing summer never ended, wishing the fun experienced with friends, romping through the natural world, could be held onto forever. . . forever children.

Adulthood comes soon enough for us all.  Let’s give our children as much childhood as possible until that day arrives so that, when it arrives, they will see it as a wonder, face it with wonder, and be better for the experience.

That, in a nutshell, is what we try to accomplish at Sequoia’s Treehouse and Sequoia’s Farm and Forest School . . . experience the wonder of life through an interaction with nature. We are a preschool with a purpose which ranges far beyond the normal curriculum of a traditional preschool.