Wise Caterpillar Wisdom

"Any adult who spends even fifteen minutes with a child outdoors finds himself drawn back to his own childhood, like Alice falling down a rabbit hole."

Sharon MacLatchie

"Frequent singing, chanting and rhythmic play can increase your child's growing vocabulary even as it enhances her motor skills...Because they are perceived as games, the child's motivation is to listen, learn and vocalize"

Don Campbell

"It is interesting to note that in the animal kingdom, the human baby is the one privileged to have by far the longest childhood. Mother Nature has wisely allowed the child's developing brain to spend a maximum number of years in the presence of siblings and adults, exploring, experimenting and playing with the infinite behavioural options that will help secure its survival."

Tony Buzan

"Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.

Michael Jordan

"It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self."

D.W. Winnicott

"It is a happy talent to know how to play."

"It's very clear from everything we know about families, that kids - especially boys - get a lot out of being around fathers. Something different and complementary to what mothers provide takes place at these times... For fathers, doing stuff with your kids is vital. It allows closeness to happen."

Steve Biddulph

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."

Deepak Chopra

"The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery."

Erik H. Erikson

"The habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference."

Aristotle

"In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior. In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself."

Lev Vygotsky

"And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.

Kahlil Gibran

"Skill to do comes of doing."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"So, in all these spheres—in painting, sculpture, drawing, music, singing, dancing, gymnastics, games, sports, writing and speech—we can carry on to our heart’s content, all through our long lives, complex and specialized forms of exploration and experiment."

Desmond Morris

"Almost all creativity involves purposeful play."

Abraham Maslow

"As astronauts and space travelers children puzzle over the future; as dinosaurs and princesses they unearth the past. As weather reporters and restaurant workers they make sense of reality; as monsters and gremlins they make sense of the unreal."

Gretchen Owocki

"Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play."

Plato

"Pausing to listen to an airplane in the sky, stooping to watch a ladybug on a plant, sitting on a rock to watch the waves crash over the quayside. Children have their own agendas and timescales. As they find out more about their world and their place in it; they work hard not to let adults hurry them. We need to hear their voices."

Cathy Nutbrown

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it."

J. Bronowski