Run, run, as fast as you can…

I don’t know why kids love to go fast.  I just know they do.  To get there, they have to crawl, pull up and then cruise. Then they toddle and waddle and walk, but I am convinced that walking is not the final goal. The end product is running. 

By the time they are 2 or 3 all they do is run.  And they are fast.  I watched the sidewalk begin to melt under the sneakers of a little guy who was running away from his mom today.  Let’s face it – they are quicker than we are, and the very act of running brings them joy.

However, running leads to accidents – heads bonked on counters and corners and knees crashed into furniture and the occasional head over heels tumble.  And let’s not underestimate the emergency room potential of two children crashing into each other while on a hypersonic mission to wear holes in the carpet. 

They have to run to be happy, but running is not safe. How do we adults (who keep these precious little people safe and happy) reconcile this dichotomy?

I gave up preventing running a long time ago in the Imagine That classroom.  Running (and going fast in general) is just too important to the children. And from a musical perspective, fast is just as valid a tempo setting as slow.  But I do have to have a way to make the running activities in class safe and integrated into the curriculum.

So yes, we run – quite a bit.  But we ALL run together and we have to ALL go the same direction around the circle.  If you are a watcher during running time you have to sit out of the running circle, so that you don’t get mowed down.  I work running into the plot by using it as a means of transportation. 

We are always going somewhere in Imagine That, and if we are going to walk, we may as well run.  And sometimes there are scary or yucky things to run away from (A dinosaur store sent us scurrying today, and an underwear store sent everyone dashing across the room last week.) 

There are other ways to go fast.  We go fast with Hot Wheel cars,  and play fast with our instruments, and we do finger plays at the speed of light. We can row a boat so fast you can barely see the oars (Well, it’s hard to see an invisible, imaginary oar anyway- but our arms are going so fast you can barely see them!)  

When we play a steady beat I make a point to emphasize both the regular beat and the double beat, so that we can go fast.  Sometimes a song allows us to even access the triple beat, and that is really, really fast. It is such joy to shake a tambourine at a breakneck pace. 

The only thing better than going fast is the ability to control that speed - to stop your flying feet on a dime and to freeze your tambourine like solid ice in an arctic blizzard.  To stop as fast and as hard as the running that necessitated the stop in the first place.  So we work on running and stopping, on driving our cars presto down the Imagine That highway and stopping them cold when the light turns red. 

Early Childhood Experts call this inhibitory control.  I call it pre-school personal power.  When the child can stop an action once it has begun (in other words, come to a squealing halt before they set the floor on fire with their speedy feet), they are showing that they have learned inhibitory control.  Next comes impulse control, which is the ability to prevent a thought form becoming an action.  Oh, yes, it’s years and years away, but it is coming…..

-posted by Miss Allison, who has worn out a large number of shoes running with her preschoolers over the years…