The Child’s Pace
The children wait for the day to begin near the wagon.
Imagine:
It is morning arrival, and four children are standing around a wagon. The heat is heavy, and brows are dewy with sweat despite that fact that it is only just after 8AM. One child notices a small grown bug crawling up a long blade of grass. The bug approaches the end of the blade and stops. It turns back, and crawls back down, down into the grass where it crawls a few inches and then repeats its climb.
Although our forest classroom awaits us, the present moment takes precedence. One child is offered a magnifying glass and kneels down, the magnifying glass directly up against his eye, for a closer look at the small creature. One of the teachers retrieves the school phone to take a picture. When the child asks for the phone to take a photograph, the teacher agrees. For the next little while, all eyes are on the bug. Where is it going and why? What is it—a stink bug? A roach? Some sort of beetle?
After some time and the arrival of another friend, the children lose sight of the bug—but the phone and the photographs and videos it takes remain an important part of the equation. The children, in fact, begin to take photographs and videos of each other! Throughout, the conversation weaves in and out of topics such as the nature of consent, the importance of choosing a subject, and the value of taking time to edit one’s photographs after they are taken.
With time, the children settle back into a calm that suggests they are ready to move on, ready to transition into the next part of the day. All together the children decide to begin their trek into the forest.
In the middle of September, in the middle of a pandemic, I began working at NOLA Nature School—an outdoor program that I have been involved with, in one way or another, for nearly four years. What I love most, as an adult, about this outdoor preschool program is the way that we are truly free to follow the children’s pace in all that we do. The vignette above is a true story—and, what’s more, is that it is characteristic of any given day in the outdoor environments that we call classrooms.
There is no rush, there are few if any ‘have-tos’, we are not always en-route to a distracting “special” that disrupts the rhythm of a calm morning. The children are the directors of their own days, and it is our privilege as the adults in their lives to follow and facilitate their self-ascribed trajectories. Is this an idyllic vision? Absolutely. But it is a deep consolation to know that such a vision is possible.
And so, as we prepare to sink into the meat of October, I invite you to consider what it would take for you to begin to approach the world in this way—at the child’s pace?
What are one or two areas of your day, your rhythm, you could benefit from taking more slowly? Alternatively, are there things that would benefit from a more dynamic or flexible structure?
Happy October, friends!
Ron