by Dennis Dalman
Too many children have apparently forgotten how to play, and Veronica Clour, owner-operator of Little House Family Center in Sauk Rapids, worries about it.
“Play is the ‘work’ of the child,” she said. “Through play, children learn about life, about relationships and about themselves. Without play, a child is empty.”
And when Clour says “play,” she means child-directed play; she means children must themselves decide what to play and how to play.
That is why the children ages 3 to 7 at Little House direct their own play indoors and outdoors. Using their considerable, natural imaginations, they interact with one another while learning about the world, all through their playing and their games.
In the morning, after they arrive at Little House, they decided which games to play with a variety of plain toys: big wooden blocks, clothes, a basket of seashells, capes, a basket of fruit, dolls. They use those toy props to create their playtime “scene of the morning” – a restaurant, say, or a hospital or a home.
“They direct the play within that scene,” Clour said. “I just provide the direction. Sometimes they disagree about the games to play, and that’s OK, it’s wonderful because they will find their needs and express themselves. They are respectful and listen to one another.”
Clour’s children clients come from Rice, Eden Valley, Little Falls, Clearwater, Monticello, Princeton and other towns near and far.
Waldorf
Clour’s Little House Preschool is the only one of its kind in central Minnesota, though there are some in the Twin Cities area. Clour’s playing-teaching methods are based on the Waldorf Method, a learning theory and practice started in 1919 in Germany by a genius educator from Austria, Rudolf Steiner.
His learning method revolves around hands-on activities and creative play, a holistic approach to develop the intellectual, practical, artistic and spiritual development within children as they grow into adults.
There are about 1,000 Waldorf-style schools in 60 countries, with many other schools that use one or more aspects of the method. Steiner’s approach, in fact, has influenced virtually all schools during the past century. It’s sometimes dubbed “experiential teaching.”
It is not surprising the German Nazis and later the communists shut down so many Waldorf schools. Its success with developing free-thinking, open-minded children, adolescents and adults did not set well with dictators and conformists.
One of Steiner’s better-known quotations is this:
“Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves.”
Little House
Little House is indeed a rather small house, owned by Clour, on a corner of Sauk Rapids’ Seventh Avenue N. and Second Street. She and her husband bought the house many years ago before moving into St. Cloud and converting the Sauk Rapids house into Little House.
The interior of the home is plain. There are few adornments other than wood floors, fairly plain walls and all kind of little furniture suited for children – a little dining table and its little chairs, for example. Toys are plain and simple – nothing noisy or electronic in the house.
Outside, too, the play equipment is simple, basic, unadorned – tarps, straw bales, wooden stools, play frames. In warm weather there is a garden in which children can plant seeds, watch them grow, harvest them and eat the results. Children spend anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours every day outdoors because, Clour noted, contact with nature is very important in releasing in children their sense of wonder, imagination and play.
Outdoors, the children discover all kinds of surprises and mysteries. One day they will pretend they are in a spaceship, next day they might devise a grinding machine or a sifting machine made of milk cartons in which they pretend to grind kernels of corn. They also like to harvest walnuts from the walnut trees from which they make, with Clour’s or her assistants’ supervision, a golden-brown dye they use to dye little square blankets. They also make dye out of grapes and marigolds.
“The children love the outside world. If it’s cold, the children decide it’s too cold, and we will go back into the house,” Clour said.
In all seasons at Little House, there are games galore: musical instruments, sing-a-longs; dance sessions; and story times. During a recent morning, when a Newsleader reporter visited Little House, the children, Clour and her two assistants gathered in a circle. As Clour recited a story about a mouse and a cat in French and English, the children participated in movements mimicking the critters in the story and repeating lines from the story.
After story hour, the children sat at their long little table for a lunch featuring organic brown rice. The children often help with cooking. They have even helped grind wheat to make bread.
Worldwide experiences
The daughter of an American father in the U.S. Air Force and a French mother, Clour was born in Normandy, France.
From 1979 to 1992, she worked for a children-development program in the U.S. Air Force. In London, England she became interested in the Waldorf Method of education, which has inspired her ever since.
She met her husband-to-be, Charles Clour, an Air Force man from Sauk Rapids. They moved to Colorado, then to France, then back to England, then to Maine, back to England and finally back to Charles’ home town, Sauk Rapids. All the while, Veronica was involved with the education of children.
“I’ve never felt de-rooted with all that traveling,” Clour said. “I can find the essence of a culture in a different country.”
Her dream was always to open a Waldorf Method type of learning center, and that is what she did in Sauk Rapids about 20 years ago.
As Clour researched the history of the Sauk Rapids house, built in 1890, she was delighted to find out a Norwegian woman with eight children had once lived there and that the woman would sit all the children down and read from her Norwegian Bible, in Norwegian. She also kept an herb garden. Even though the Norwegian woman is long gone, Clour relates to her and her love of children that went on in the “Little House” long before Clour opened her family center in it.
The Clours have one daughter, Andreya, 9, adopted from Guatemala, who is a talented violinist and singer.
“Andreya was just as I had always imagined,” Clour said. “She is the same little soul I always wanted, ever since my 20s. She was meant to be my daughter. It’s just that we had to find the doorway to connect, and we did. She was only four months old, in a foster home in Guatemala. And we were very, very lucky to be able to adopt her.”
Future
From years of observing children at play and at learning. Clour is convinced one reason children – and adults – seem sometimes to have shorter attention spans is they are not allowing enough down time, enough room for play as an integral part of life.
She also believes there is too much emphasis on academics at a too-early age.
Kindergarten these days, she said, is often considered “the new first grade,” and children are pressured to learn before they are ready.
“They need time to play before they enter the world of academics,” she said.
“Children need one thing at a time. They need time provided by ‘slow parenting’ that goes back to simplicity and basics. The world is different now, the family structure is different. There are attention-span problems, too many tired children. There are more children with issues nowadays, and there are many reasons depending on what you read.”
But, whatever the reasons, Clour is convinced parents should slow down, relax and provide lots of unpressured, quiet play time for their children.