2018 Wild Things Annual Workshops - 9th & 11th of June 2018
We are very excited to confirm Seattle’s best known Pre School Teacher, Blogger and now author of his first book, Tom Hobson (aka Teacher Tom) for the Wild Things’ Annual Workshops in 2018.
For the past 15 years Teacher Tom has taught at Woodland Park Cooperative, a small play based cooperative preschool in Seattle’s Fremont neighbourhood. In 2009, Tom wanted an outlet for his observations about the daily happenings of his school and so began blogging as a way of starting a conversation with himself. Nine years later and the result - Teacher Tom’s Blog - has become a worldwide phenomenon amongst early childhood educators and parents with a readership of 250,000 following his musings on the theory and practice of play based learning.
Tom believes the purpose of all play is to learn. 'Any time you observe Children you’ll see that through their play they are performing their own experiments in the world, asking and answering their own questions about their community, people they find there, the things they find there.’
‘It’s such a more natural way to learn than what we consider to be the traditional model of an adult deciding what a child needs to learn and when they need to learn it and also how they need to learn it, and trying to impose knowledge on the children. We know that children retain just a fraction of the knowledge of what’s being taught through direct instruction. Whereas when children are asking and answering their own questions they learn [much more] because they’re ready for those answers.’
It's a real privilege to have Tom join us in New Zealand to speak on Play Based Learning and places on these workshops are selling out fast. Join us and discover how we as adults can support children's learning and thinking.