Another amazing article by Gavin McCormack was about raising amazing children. McCormack states that there are 11 most important things that we as adults need to understand, before we can even think about helping our children reach their full potential.
1. Order – For a child it means s/he has the need for predictable events in her/his life, for example, an ordered environment where everything has a certain place.
2. Orientation – For a child it means that s/he needs to know where and how s/he fits into a particular time or environment and how to adapt.
3. Exploration – For children it is the curiosity leading to explore and the desire got understand. We can easily see that children are the best explorers and they must have the freedom to explore as rich an environment as possible.
4. Communication – This takes the three forms of speaking, writing and reading. As educators, freedom of speech, listening, and story telling help enable these to grow.
5. Activity – A child is restless and needs constant activity which seems purposeless to the adult. Give the child the freedom to move around.
6. Manipulation – A child has the need to touch, feel and to experience the physical world.
7. Work – It is the ability to put into reality what the imagination suggests, we must therefore never judge or stop a child’s work, realizing that his/her goals are different than ours.
8. Repetition – This tendency is the ability to do over and over again an exercise in order to reach perfection and to experience the joy of increased control and understanding of one’s world.
9. Exactness – We give the child the freedom to repeat an activity until it reaches a point of exactness. He/she is shown exactly how to properly use the materials.
10. Abstraction – We must allow concrete experiences through the materials in order for these to provide a solid understanding of the concepts intended.
11. Self-perfection – It is the aim of every adult to teach the children so that they can control themselves and seek self-perfection through much repetition and success and even failure.
