finding new and unique ways to expand learning opportunities(site design by Alastair B 15)

 
 

Why the Digital Backpack?

Does your child love to play games on your computer, but still use a pen and paper for schoolwork?

Can your child spend hours on the computer and yet hate to do a minute of schoolwork?

A poem by Loris Malaguzzi

The child is made of one hundred.
The child has a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred, always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling
of loving
a hundred joys for singing
and understanding
a hundred worlds to discover
a hundred worlds to invent
a hundred worlds to dream.
The child has a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine
the school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child to think
without hands
to do without head
to listen and not speak
to understand without joy
to love and marvel
only at Easter and Christmas.
They tell the child
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child that
work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there!

Loris Malaguzzi

Quoted in The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything