early play

The secret in education lies in respecting the student. Ralph Waldo Emerson

 Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them. ~ James Russell Lowell

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

Babies are like little suns that, in a magical way, bring warmth, happiness and light into our lives. ~  Kartini Diapari-Oengider

Connecting with nature allows us to feel restored

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. ~ Charles A. Lindbergh, Life, 1967

Friedrich Froebel coined the term kindergarten and believed in the role of the garden and nature in development. He believed that humans and nature are connected at a spiritual level.

Now I see the secret of making the best persons, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. - Walt Whitman

We are fully human only while playing, and we play only when we are human in the truest sense of the word. ~ Rudolf Steiner

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves. ~ Jean Piaget