A blog by Sarah Oliver of Smiles and Miles
Children inspire me in so many ways; their perspective on life, their interpretations of the world and watching them grow as learners.
Can you remember the last time you stopped and spent some time to look at something with awe and wonder- to really see it, like it was the first time you had ever seen it? To children, this comes naturally and as adults, we call it mindfulness. Being busy with our every day lives, we often lose this eye of a child perspective. Working with children reminds me to take time out and appreciate the smallest of things. I was working with a year 1 boy in his garden recently, practicing his letter formation with chalk on the paving stones when he saw some ants. He stopped and gazed into the hole they were streaming out of . We had a five minute conversation about ants and then went back to the handwriting. This moment was refreshing and there are many gems like!
Children’s innocent interpretation of the world is wonderful. It’s amazing how deeply very young children think. One child came up to me in class this year and said, “In the olden days we had God who people were afraid of but now people aren’t afraid of 
God because we have the police!” Sometimes it can be random comments that surprise me like the child who stopped me while I was reading a story to say, “Once I found a fly with only one wing. I called him Billy and I threw him down the stairs.” Now what could I say to that? “Lovely, right where were we in the story….?” And after reading Roald Dahl’s, The Twits, another child said, “You know, I really like Roald Dahl stories, infact, I think I like them better than Shakespeare!”
Finally, for me, the most rewarding factor involved in teaching children is the fact that I can watch them grow as individuals in a short space of time. Sometimes they come to work with me with low confidence in their abilities and aren’t making expected academic progress at school. I begin working with them by using metacognition strategies to help them to become more motivated and successful learners. I teach them to view themselves positively as learners; to believe that they ‘can do it’, to aim high, to realise that there are no boundries to learning and that we all learn in different ways. I tell them that learning new things is a life long skill, that we all begin on ‘stuck’ and that it’s ok and
actually quite exciting as it means we are going to find something out; to master a skill or a concept and gain new knowledge. Once the children understand all of these things, the impact this way of thinking has on their learning is huge. It’s just so lovely to see the panic on a child’s face replaced with smiles!
This is why I work with children- they make me smile.
