5-star Book Reviews: Playhouse: Optimistic Stories Of Real Hope For Families With Little Children

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5-star Book Reviews: Playhouse: Optimistic Stories Of Real Hope For Families With Little Children

About the Book

Pete Seeger once said: “The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.” In many ways, writing a book about my family’s experiences at Playhouse, a cooperative pre-school founded in 1951, is in fact telling an optimistic story that has the potential to inspire others, early childhood teachers and parents alike, to search for, create, or contribute to progressive learning environments for their own children and students.

Playhouse serves as more than just a school for children. It is a learning community for parents, where they can learn and embrace progressive models of education. This type of parental education is more important now than ever before, especially in the face of parental opt out movements and objections to standardized testing and curriculum like the common core standards.

Parents and early childhood teachers need to educate themselves about the tenets of democratic and progressive schooling, and there is very little written for them. Early childhood teachers often graduate with certification but are unsure of how to implement this progressive pedagogy in their classrooms or how even to find schools where these types of practices are encouraged. They may have been prepared to teach in a progressive way but are unsure of how to apply these ideas in the classroom with 15 or more little ones in front of them.

Finally, with the Core Curriculum Standards and their aligned standardized tests dictating the curriculum and teaching in public schools, parents and early childhood educators need a platform to innovate schools for their children/students. This optimistic telling serves as a reminder for us all that even in this tumultuous storm of standards and testing, progressive preschools with deep commitments to social justice exist, are thriving, and are available.

Book Reviews

“Beautifully written, insightful, and truly hopeful. I love the way she weaves together the personal with narratives about progressive education. I felt like I both connected to it and learned from it! These are the kinds of books about parenting and education that I love!” - Amazon

“A very personal, heartfelt, and informed discussion of early childhood education.” - Amazon

“Fantastic read for parents and teachers alike. Monica Taylor beautifully illustrates what children need, what parents want, and what teachers need to do to create spaces in which young children can thrive and develop into thoughtful, confident, compassionate, and creative human beings.” - Amazon

“With an ethnographer’s eye and an oral historian’s ear, with the passion of a memoirist and the urgency of an advocate, Monica Taylor invites us into a community of children, reminding us that in our anxious, hurry-up world, the magic of a child’s growth is precious and cannot be forced.” - William Ayers – Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society.

“Wonderful book that captures the essence of an amazing place!” - Amazon

“Delightful read! A history of a specific school with personal stories illuminated by educational principals. If you are wondering what to look for in a preschool for your child or thinking about what preschool education should look like in our society, this book offers a blueprint or a recipe.” - Amazon

“Monica Taylor’s book, Playhouse: Optimistic Stories of Real Hope for Families with Little Children, is just what we need – a vivid picture of what good early childhood “schooling” looks like. As she shows us, it is indeed possible to build on children’s incredible intellectual efforts to make sense of the world rather than stifling them. Bravo, Monica!” - Deborah Meier – author of The Power of Their Ideas, Lessons to America from a Small School in Harlem, and In Schools We Trust.

“Incredible story and very interesting insight into a unique group of people and the progressive school they built from the ground up.” - Amazon

“Playhouse is really two things: ‘house’ is a place where children go, whereas, ‘play’ is a process of learning, experiencing and caring. Monica Taylor writes a book that parents and educators (from preK through college levels) should read. As parents, they should look for an education setting that models the practices of Playhouse for their children. As educators, they should find ways to transform their teaching environment into a Playhouse.” - Amazon

“Incredible, utterly magical, Monica Taylor is making a huge difference in the world! "Playhouse: Optimistic Stories of Real Hope for Families with Little Children is a book for every parent who is considering a preschool for their child and also for parents of children who are attending preschool.” - Amazon

Read all reviews on Amazon. Also available on Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Indigo Books, IndieBound, Books-A-Million

Book News, Monica Taylor, Garn Press NewsGarn PressMarch 6, 2020