The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Childen Use Stories to Shape Their Lives
Vivian Paley is a kindergarten teacher who won a MacArthur "genius" award for her work in her classroom at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and for the books she has written about how children play and think and imagine. Now she describes her final year of teaching when the preschoolers focused on the classic picture books of Leo Lionni and related his stories to their own lives. One creative child, Reeny, becomes a kind of mentor to her teacher, helping Paley discover her own uncertainties and connections in Lionni's elemental tales. There's no pedagogical jargon here; no stages of abstract thinking. Paley shows how far kids can go when their learning is connected, uninterrupted, and interactive--if the teacher is open, and the stories are great.Hazel Rochman--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.