Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing kids

[Sharon Villines (sharonvillines]

on 7/13/00 12:32 PM, Rob Sandelin at floriferous [at] msn.com wrote:

> As part of another thread it was asked, what is the future for cohousing
> kids. Well, of course, who knows?

It wasn't cohousing but in the early 1970s when my children were small,
parent coop daycare schools became popular. After our school had been
running for a while in various forms, we hired certified teachers. One
teacher was young and just out of school (with freshly taught norms for
child behavior), the other was in her 50s and had been teaching kindergarten
for 30 years.

Both teachers were amazed by the social skills the children had and
specifically were amazed that they were light years ahead of "normal"
developmental stages. The 18-month-olds were making up plays using finger
puppets, 4-year-olds were teaching 6-year-olds to read, 2-year-olds were
comforting and consoling tearful new students, the three-to-sixers were
learning Spanish from Sesame Street and talking Spanish "baby-talk" to each
other while playing. They treated the teachers as equals, not as the bosses
of the place.

In fact my daughter said she couldn't ask the teacher for help with her
reading because it would embarrass the teacher. When I asked why, she said,
"Jamie doesn't know how to read yet. I checked her out. When she pretends
she is reading to us, she skips all the big words and sometimes just tells
the story from looking at the pictures."

Sharon
-- 
Sharon Villines, Editor
The MacGuffin Guide to Detective Fiction
http://www.macguffin.net
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington, DC
http://www.takomavillage.org