Wally's Stories

by Vivian Gussin Paley

Book Overview

Teachers are often taught that young children are incapable of logical thought. Prone to fantasy and unruffled by inconsistency, preschool children are frequently baffled by the first lessons of early schooling. Trained to gently resist the child's illogic, teachers sometimes create just the incomprehension and anxiety they mean to avoid. In Wally's Stories, Vivian Paley shows that none of this need be so.

Wally's Stories is...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067494593X
• ISBN13: 9780674945937
• Release Date: August 1987
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Delightful

If you enjoy being around children and hearing how they talk and think, you will enjoy this book. As a classroom teacher I found it to be a refreshing contrast to our current climate in education of high stakes testing and our push to turn children into mini-achievers at a very early age. I have bought several copies of this book to share with colleagues, friends and family.

delightful look into a preschool classroom

This is a funny, thoughtful collection of young children's conversations compiled over the course of a year. The teacher's observations and reflections helped me rethink the conversations I hear in my own classroom.

If You Want To Learn....

If you are willing to learn from children, I recommend this fascinating book. Paley's taped conversations and stories from her Kindergarten classes reveal the engaged young minds at work; their creativity and inventiveness is genuine and persistent; experience is never so important as imagination.The narratives that the children invent reveal how their minds work, how they search for meaning, and how the best explanations need not be the most rational. I recommend this book for anyone who has children or who works with children. Also, I recommend it for anyone who is intrigued about why we search for meaning, why we tell stories, why we invent and create. "Out of the mouths of babes...."

Fascinating

I'm supposed to read this book for a child development course I'm taking here at school. That is, I'm supposed to read it a month from now, but I'm reading it for pleasure. For pleasure! I never read for pleasure, but I can't put this book down. Full of anecdotal material from a kindergarten class, this is as truthful a look at kids as will ever be published.