Jan 27 2008
Accepting and Celebrating Every Child’s Differences
Friday, January 25th, our daughter, Katie, turned 26. Happy Birthday, Katie! As we were talking on Friday, she commented on how she has always loved her birthday because it’s been our family tradition of making each person’s birthday a day of recognition and celebration, complete with cake and candles, a specially prepared dinner and presents to open.
Knowing how much each of us enjoy the recognition and celebration of our birthday has helped me realize the importance and power of celebrating, every day, the strengths and gifts of each child as we accept and celebrate their differences. Here are just a few of my reasons to accept and celebrate every child’s learning differences:
1. Accepting and celebrating differences respects and honors the individual learner. It demonstrates an important understanding that all children learn differently and benefit enormously when teachers differentiate the instruction to provide access to and acceleration of the curriculum to meet the diversity of student needs.
To read more about all the different ways our brains are wired and why we all learn differently, check out Mel Levine’s website, All Kinds of Minds. It’s listed my Blogroll. You’ll also want to read his phenomenally helpful book, A Mind At a Time.
If you want to learn more about differentiation, click on the link in the Blogroll.
2. Accepting and celebrating differences is an acknowledgement of the truth that not all students learn best from a logical-mathematical perspective. This limited logical-mathematical perspective is one of the main criticisms of the high stakes testing children are subjected to these days. If we truly want to leave no child behind, we are going to have to honor all the ways children best demonstrate what they have learned.
Howard Gardner, in Frames of Mind, identified the theory of multiple intelligences over 25 years ago and paved the way to accept learning differences. You can read about Gardner and his theory of multiple intelligences by checking on the link in the Blogroll
3. Accepting and celebrating differences in our children is really all about affirming and loving our children as unique individuals who all have strengths and gifts.
Just as we celebrate our child on his or her birthday, now is the time to truly accept and celebrate the differences in all of our children and expect our child’s teachers to do the same in the classroom.
What are your reasons for accepting and celebrating your child’s differences? I’d like to hear from you!
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