Teach Your Children to Wonder

Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? I promised myself many years ago that I would stay young by never losing my desire to wonder.  I won't grow up and think that I know everything.  I will approach every day with the hunger to learn that a seven year old has.  

Today I told the class that I had no room in my life for students who knew everything and were always right.  We can't truly begin to learn until we let ourselves me vulnerable and admit to each other that we might be wrong and there is more to learn.  I would be a useless teacher and they would be useless students if we showed up to class thinking we knew everything already.

This applies to everything, but today I was applying it to science.  We talked about inquiry and the power of asking questions and wondering about the world.  We are where we are as a society because great men and women wondered if they could do new things, improve things, or do them faster.  We will start all of our explorations into science with inquiry and hypothesis.  We will work to make ourselves vulnerable enough to learn something new if that is what our data shows us.

I love nurturing wonder.  Encourage your children to ask questions and don't be afraid to help them learn the answer instead of telling them the answer.  One of my most memorable experiences as a child was when we asked my friend's mom how the return tubes worked at the bank.  She pulled through the drive through and took four of us into the bank and the bank manager let us come behind the counter and explained it to us.  There are so many opportunities to take advantage of when you look at the world as a series of questions instead of seeing it as a series of answers.  Allow yourself to be vulnerable and have the curiosity of a child instead of feeling like mature people have to have all of the answers.