Every once in a while, I re-evaluate the Garden School, and I am always reminded that our little school, which so many people put effort and love into building, is a true work of art. When I ask myself who we are, I come back to the same response, “We are a group activity place.” When I ask myself what this means, I have to answer, “It means that we focus on every child as part of our group.”

The ultimate question is why has the Garden School become focused on “the group?” The answer has never eluded me. I have seen from the beginning of my career of working with children, that my job is to greet the early learner coming directly from his own personal home with his family, and take him through the process of learning how to be part of a group, and then watching as he waves goodbye and marches off to big school. The Garden School is a child’s first group, and he will be experiencing groups for the rest of his life, and he has to know how to be a vital part of that group.

In the beginning of every school year, there are forty children from as many as forty homes. Every home is different. Every family is different. Every list of needs is different. Our job at the Garden School is to take all the differences and create a mosaic of all those separate needs and backgrounds and make a cohesive engine.

That engine, like any engine, produces work. In our case, it produces activities and learning and play and projects that benefit the whole school. One child excels in reading, another becomes a master builder, another a nursemaid to the other kids. One child is our comedian, another is the tattler, another zeroes in on the play or geography, or story time, or chair stacking as a helper.

Within a short period of time, most children gravitate towards having a particular role at school that they feel comfortable with. Then, they begin to develop a public personality that will stay with them a lifetime. Our job is to help them create these public faces by finding out what they like, what they are good at, and what makes them want to work. This all SHOULD happen in what we call the Early Childhood Years…ages three through six.

Developing a public personality allows children to make friends and begin to understand what friendship is…all the giving and taking with people who don’t live in your house. “I will do this if you will do that, or  I will let you play with my building if you,” and the bartering, the communication, the exchange of needs that creates friendship begins to work.

One of the delights of my job is to see our Early Childhood friendships continue over the years. When a nice young man visited the Garden School a few months ago, one of our teachers, a former graduate, recognized him as someone with whom she had gone to school, and they struck up an old friendship. High school kids often reminisce about their years and friendships at the Garden School.

What first time parents often find amazing, is how quickly a child will develop a brand new public personality which is often quite different from their home personality. “Oh, he won’t perform in front of people…” says the parent of a formerly very shy child. When the parent sees the extraordinarily shy child robustly deliver a very funny line and gets a laugh from the whole audience, they begin to see what kind of public face their child is developing.

“He is a very picky eater, and he won’t drink milk.” After the first week, when the child is snarfing down every morsel on his plate and asking for seconds of everything including milk, parents are agog.

It all happens as a matter of course. We move from “getting acquainted” in September, to the big play at Thanksgiving and all the activities in between, it just kind of happens a little at a time. I am always amazed by how fluid this development is. One child arrives in September with his thumb in his mouth, barely able to use the bathroom with confidence, and by Christmas, he is building monster buildings of his own design or reading on his own merit on a second grade level.

When I ask myself how this happens, I realize that allowing the children the freedom to develop skills at their own pace with a lot of push in the direction they seem to be going, works. “Can I…” and my job is to make “can I” possible. My attitude has to be, “You can and you will, and let’s make that possible together.” Our job is to foster adventure. Adventure does not happen by sitting still. Every child should desire to get in the game and find a place to succeed simply because it’s an achievement for him.

There are many parts to a school year at the Garden School. Teachers, parents and kids all work hard to make these separate and individual parts not only fun, but learning experiences that increase lives and talents. Teachers often say they learn as much as kids about how things work and how people create a cohesive group. Teachers working together is as important as children working together. Last week we made globes at school, and when the fast painters finished they asked the slow painters if they could help. It was idyllic.

Then the school year begins to close, and we move into summer, and a whole new adventure begins. If you can teach a child to swim, you can teach him to read…that’s how it’s done…that’s what we do…because it works!