Why we do it this way
None of this is new.
Other Goose rests on three things people have known about raising children for a very long time: read to them, get them outside, and leave them room to work things out. Here's what we take from each of these ideas and what it looks like in our lessons.
Read to them.
Being read to isn't (only) practice for reading. It's how a child encounters words she can't yet read herself and gets captured by a story that stretches her attention span. Pediatricians now tell every parent to start in infancy, and the families who were coached to read and play with their children from birth had calmer, more settled children by the time school started.
Unfortunately, this habit has a way of ending once a child can read alone. Don't let it! Some of the best years of reading aloud are yet to come once your child is able to participate in an ever-growing capacity.
Most of our lessons recommend a tried-and-true book to read together - we've got over 1,300 different books linked across the library!
Go outside.
Outside isn't the reward for finishing your work. A twenty-minute walk somewhere green changes how well a child can concentrate afterwards, and children with trees and fields near home carry the hard parts of life more lightly than children without. None of that needs a plan or a destination. A puddle will do.
In our lessons: most weeks send you out the door at least once, to your yard, a park, a walk around the block, or a creek - into nature's classroom.
Let them figure it out.
When you show a child the one right way to use something, she tends to stop there. When you leave it a little bit of a puzzle, she keeps going and finds the rest herself. That's not stubbornness; it's how small children learn, and it's why we're careful about telling you exactly how a lesson should go.
We call this open-ended exploration. In practice, it means a lesson that asks more than it answers, and leaves the door open for the journey to continue. Free play of this kind has been disappearing from childhood for at least fifty years, and we think it matters that it comes back.
In our lessons: the majority will end with a challenge: a way to take the idea further or an open-ended question - giving you a 20-minute launchpad into what may be the next adventure, science experiment, or game!
Follow all the rabbit trails.
Most educational programs have a core and an "everything-else". Math and reading carry the weight; the rest fills the time left over (if there is any). We don't think a four-year-old should specialize. Habits, Foundations, Relationships, Outdoors, Logic, Math, Creativity, Literature, Rhythms and Language are each equally represented across our lesson library. Let your child wander across all ten topics and follow their curiosity into new, beautiful, unpredictable places.
- Habits
- Foundations
- Relationships
- Outdoors
- Logic
- Math
- Creativity
- Literature
- Rhythms
- Language
Where these ideas come from
Other Goose isn't a curriculum, and our lesson library incorporates ideas from many rich learning philosophies and traditions. If you've been inspired or shaped by any of these resources, you'll be happy to find them woven throughout our lessons. If these are new names to you, we recommend checking them out!