Teaching the Whole Child and Social Emotional Learning

It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. D. W. Winnicott 

What is it to Teach the Whole Child, and how does that equate with Social Emotional Learning? 

Teaching the Whole Child is about embracing every aspect of, not only what it is to be a child, but a fierce advocate in your own classroom and schools of the individual child. This does not just begin in Pre-K, but it extends on to the 19 year old student ready to graduate or face dropping out. 

Social Emotional Learning is putting into place those key ingredients so as to help form not only the Whole Child, but to prepare each child for developing the tools necessary to be kind, caring, altruistic, self-supporting, self-loving, giving, and at times their own fierce advocate. 

Long before the contemporary terms Whole Child, Play-based Learning and Social Emotional Learning were being used, we were doing "play" as a regular process in our schools. I remember going off to kindergarten and the classroom was set up with a play kitchen and a grocery store. The focus was on how to work together, how to take turns, how to care for toys, how to open up our own milk carton, how to lay quietly so as not to disturb the others in the room, and yes take a nap. We were learning how to function in a our own mini-society. I can smell the paste, crayons, and Mrs. Smith's perfume. I recall what it felt like to learn how to trust another woman (person) other than my mother as she created a place of mutual love, support, trust, and caring among children who were not my brothers and sisters. All of that was me becoming independent from my familial unit. Play allowed me to grow as an independent person and trust a bigger world. (I am still friends with some of those children I met in kindergarten.) 

Teaching the Whole Child - Defined 

TWC is a sensory experience; all of the child’s senses are accessed in order to create a meaningful learning experience

TWC challenges a child academically

TWC engages a child and elevates them to a new understanding of themselves and the world in which they live

TWC provides a safe, secure, healthy, relational reality.

TWC guarantees that a child is prepared as a 21st century learner

Simple ways you can embrace the Whole Child into your learning environments and infuse Social Emotional Learning: 
Don't be afraid to read your students stories to get them thinking. Children's literature is a profound way to get your kids thinking, feeling and responding. Patricia Polacco is a provocative story teller, who gets to the heart of the matter. Imagine being the next TED presenter in your own classrooms or schools. 

Take your students off campus and have an organized, intentional, purpose-filled lesson planned. Don't just go to a park to play, but go to a park with a lesson on civic responsibility in mind and clean up the park. Help them experience the world around them and other than the cost of the school bus it is a free field trip, filled with amazing lessons. 

Invite professionals into the classroom to not only talk about what they do, but how they help other people, give to others and integrate literature, music and art into the lesson. 

Infuse STEM into your lesson planning. STEM integration leads a child into understanding the interconnectedness of the world and themselves. So, if science is the study of nature and mathematics is the universal language used to explain nature, than play is the universal exploration of the unknown that leads to scientific understanding and ultimate explanation. 

Play as the continuous evidence of creativity...play as both a child's language about interpreting the world, cut them off from play and the child is lost in an unintelligible environment. D.W. Winnicott

The picture at the top of this blog is me at the ripe ole age of 5. You can see the joy that is expressed in the faces of my cousin Scotty age 4, brother Ricky age 3 and myself. We were all about play and creating our own world. This is one of my favorite pictures because it reminds me of the wonderful childhood I had and how filled with wonder and experience that we had. It is why I am an educator, because every child deserves the right to freely experience great joy and discover the self!

In closing Teaching the Whole Child and Social Emotional Learning is all wrapped up in a beautiful Play-filled bow!