Colson Whitehead Quotes

If we allow our one-and-a-half year old to "help" us fold laundry he will learn something about buttons, zippers, snaps, where things go, the physical properties of cloth, what happens when you drop it, how easy or hard it is to carry compared with everything else he has ever carried, what clean clothes smell like, how a big towel can turn into a small bundle, how the small bundle you just folded can turn into a big towel again, plus any songs we care to sing or stories or related or unrelated facts we care to pass on.

Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces.

Obviously, the difference between a game and actual training is you're using your whole body, so in that sense, maybe not, although maybe something to do with reaction, the speed of reaction, maybe that was of use during the training.

Parents bobble between a nostalgia-infused yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits.

Right now many schools have no recess. Most schools have no PE.

A boy cannot begin playing ball too early. I might almost say that while he is still creeping on all fours he should have a bouncing rubber ball.

I learned that there are two things that kids really like: movement and love. Happy kids move; unhappy, they don't move.

I learned to walk as a baby, and I haven't had a lesson since.

'Tree Fu Tom' is a truly interactive programme because it is designed to help children get up off the sofa and physically move, which is a very important part of children's development.

The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.

Children need to move to develop their brain; it's a natural urge. That's why boys will run after a ball and play soccer despite how many video games are available to them, and they can't help themselves from building with Lego bricks as well. They want to be creating something that's uniquely their own.

I visited a Child Friendly Space where children take part in structured play and development activities in a safe environment. These are designed to develop their cognitive ability as well as address their psychosocial needs. As I watched them sing songs and take part in games, it struck me that these kids could be anywhere in the world.

Physical development fosters learning.

Think, for a moment, of the countless happy childhood hours you spent with this amazing device: Drawing perfect horizontals, drawing perfect verticals, drawing really spastic diagonals, trying to scrape away the silver powder from the window so you could look inside.

But I was 22 before I took my first dance class. I had never been athletic, so I was very stiff; I still am. I think what I got mostly from dance was carriage.

I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?

And I never thought this life was possible,You're the yellow bird that I've been waiting for. In polaroids you were dressed in women's clothes Were you made ashamed, why'd you lock them in a drawer? Well, I don't think that I ever loved you more Well let the poets cry themselves to sleep And all their tearful words will turn back into steam The sound of loneliness makes me happier.

Late at night when all the world is sleeping I stay up and think of you and I wish on a star that somewhere you are thinking of me too...Cause I'm dreaming of you tonight 'Til tomorrow I'll be holding you tight! And there's nowhere in the world I'd rather be than here in my room, dreaming about you and me.

Working with children is very different than the way in which I work with adults. I never tell the children the actual truth of the thing that I want them to act. Although children are really into play and play acting, and this is a major part of their existence, they never actually find the playing or acting of adults credible.

Play is as necessary to the perfect development of a child as sunshine is to the perfect development of a plant.

the brain works better if the hand works too.

It is interesting that amongst children of preschool age, the more intelligent ones tend to sleep less than the dull ones. After the age of seven this relationship is reversed, the more intelligent schoolchildren sleeping more than the dull ones.

Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.

The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.

When mental development is under discussion, there are many who say, 'How does movement come into it? We are talking about the mind.' And when we think of intellectual activity, we always imagine people sitting still, motionless. But mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. It is vital that educational theory and practice should be informed by that idea.