Circle Time and Movement - part 1

The teacher begins to hum a little tune, a little tune that she uses to gather the children into  circle. One or two of them come. Most of them ignore her. She starts circle anyway and hopes  for the best.  

One child has been hiding in the corner all morning. When he hears the song he moves to  hiding under the table. An adult would need long arms to reach him there, so he knows they  won’t bother to try.  

One child moves slowly over to the circle area and falls heavily onto the floor. He lies on his  back and begins to move his head back and forth, while he mutters, “Nope. Nope. Nope.” After  a while he puts his thumb in his mouth, but he still keeps saying nope. It’s only slightly muffled  now.  

One child comes to the circle and looks entreatingly at the teacher. The teacher is not watching  her at that particular moment, so she misses it. The look meant “help.” This child is really a  golden child and she tries hard to follow the teacher, but it is just more than she can do. She  gives up. She gives up, but to save face she acts as if it’s a choice not to join in and instead to  make a circus of things. The finale happens when this child plops down onto the boy with his  thumb in his mouth. In the end almost the whole class is one giant dog pile.  

Circle is over. One or two of the children made several half hearted attempts at various  gestures, or joined somewhat into the song. No one did the whole thing. None of the gestures  were consistently beautiful or complete. The teacher is aware this is not what she wants, but  she’s not sure what to do about it. Why won’t the children participate?  

It could be that those who are not participating are doing it inwardly, so it’s ok. They are not.  They are not joining in because they can’t yet. You might think that those who are “being  disruptive or disrespectful” of the circle are doing this on purpose. They also are not. They are  trying hard to cover up what they just can’t do, but what they know they should be able to do. In  both of these scenarios something important is being overlooked. The children don’t do it  because they can’t do it yet. They cannot yet imitate, so they fail before they begin. Yet is a  very important word to include here. We say yet because we know it can still happen, if we  address the difficulty in the right way.  

It’s a big step forwards to recognize that there are fewer and fewer children today who can  imitate. It’s a step forward because when we recognize the difficulty we are headed in the right  direction towards discovering the root of the difficulty and when we can find the root we are on  our way to helping the child overcome the difficulty. It’s also important, because when we  become aware that something is not working it should free us up to try something new. To keep  doing what clearly doesn’t work is not going to be productive.  

So where do we look for a new idea, where can we find the roots of imitation? In “The Genius of  Language” Rudolf Steiner is quoted as saying that “The first step of the continuing  metamorphosis during a child’s first three years is actually the transformation of the baby’s  gestures and movements of the limbs into the movements of the larynx, bringing forth sounds of  speech. The next step is the internalization of the language for the process of thinking.” He is telling us we have to look at year one if we want to understand the progression of development  in all the years to come. What are the gestures and movements of year one?  

The newborn is a gravity bound, horizontal being. Throughout year one the child works very  hard to overcome this gravity and come to a right relationship to levity, so they are moving from  the horizontal to the vertical. This begins with the head, then the torso, then the ability to roll over, sit up, crawl and eventually stand. When the child can stand they have overcome the  gravity they were born with. Not only that, but in order to stand on two feet the child has to have  made a solid relationship to balance. The next step will be walking, but there is one other  important kind of movement the child has to work their way through in year one.

 At birth the limbs move, but they move without volition, awareness or consciousness. People  call these movements reflexive movements. Sometime in year one intention should enter in.  The child is aware enough to know that that hand belongs to them, and they can control what it  does. The child sees a favorite toy. They know they can expand their hand outwards towards  the toy, grasp the toy and contract their limb to bring the toy up close. There is much talk about  “overcoming primitive reflexes.” Really it’s not a matter of overcoming something so much as it  is bringing consciousness to the movement. For the little child that consciousness takes the  form of a wish to bring the toy in nearer. Because the child has been working to bring  awareness to their own movements since day one they are able to take charge of their  movements.

By the end of year one, when the child can finally stand in balance this means that the child has  prepared for themselves an awareness of space that allows them to begin to move in space.  Walking! This awareness is not something the child would articulate. Right/left, forward/ backward, up/down are not something the child could or should be able to articulate, but they  are instinctual awarenesses. This instinctual awareness of space is the root of imitation. They  can live into the teacher’s movements and gestures because they have internalized movement.

This awareness is the origin of the “Sense of Our Own Movement.” When the child in year one  begins to be aware that they can control their limbs, the “Sense of Their Own Movement”  begins. This is one of the foundational four lower senses, and its gift is to allow the child to  make sense of the world around them spatially so that they can internalize movement. It’s what  allows the child to feel joy in movement. This skill is necessary not only for imitation, but also for  the understanding of academics later in the grades. If you think it through you will notice that all  learning really involves following the movement of the process or activity, both outwardly and  inwardly. Letters have a shape that the child has to follow. A sentence, a paragraph and an  essay have a beginning, a middle and an end. All math is movement, as is handwork, music,  sculpture or games. Part of this sense is the ability to understand gesture. Understanding  gesture means the child can understand social cues, so they can join into playground activities  with more success. This sense is also what facilitates the child’s ability to follow directions.  When we hear directions we have to be able to internalize the “map” or image of the directions  so that we can then follow them outwardly.  

Most of us begin to work with the children at age three or four. By age three or four the child  should have successfully completed those gesture and movement tasks from year one. The  reality is that most of them these days have not. They have not and so they cannot imitate.  They don’t yet have enough awareness of their own inner space to follow the movements of the teacher through imitating.  

Part of understanding the root of the difficulty involves understanding what the child is asking us  through their behavior. They are asking us to pay attention to something, and asking us to help  them. If we only look at the outer behavior, then we are only looking at the symptoms, and when  we only address the symptoms, not only will the child not improve, but often we do harm as well.  We resort to things that Steiner called, “heaven knows what that destroys the genius.” The first  step then is to understand the question, and begin to address what is right in front of us.