Living By Wonder: The Imaginative Life of Childhood

Contents

Part One: The Languages of Childhood

Making a Language of Childhood

The Wind of The Marigold

The First Question of All

Infant Joy

Trying On A Hat

Part Two: Learnings and Rememberings

The Pulse of Learning

The Child’s Remembering

Acting Out Daydreams

The Story The Child Keeps

Part Three: The Solitary Voice

Children and Their Solitude

A Season for Listening

Emily’s Tree

The Speaking of Rainbows

Part Four: Within Nature

The Blossom Shaping

A Single Branch Will Do

The Creatures They Are

The Deep Water Had Deeper Fishes

Part Five: Being Alive

The Dancing Child

Time Is a Child Playing

Living By Wonder

Lewis portrays his insights in children’s profound thinking based on his interactions as a teacher and parent. Practical workshop descriptions, poetic quotes, and personal accounts are included. Lewis promotes the belief that imagination is a natural birthright and a treasure not to be squelched by standards-based curriculums.

—Rebecca Martin, Schools Arts Magazine

This book is excitingly rich…On every page are thoughts and phrases that like pebbles tossed into a pool set our adult minds in motion with the possibilities of language and imagination.

—Ellen Dissanayake, author and teacher.

In this lovely book, Richard Lewis demystifies the child’s imagination while capturing its poetic spirit.

—Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education

The book centers on children, but one hopes passionately that adults will lay it to heart also. Do we not need it just as much?

—Elizabeth Sewell, educator and author

Richard Lewis has retained a rare and almost uncanny sense of the experience of childhood. He combines this with immense sensitivity to the language and thinking of young children today. The result is a wonderfully engaging and life-affirming book that will both delight and provide practical help to anyone who spends time with children.

—Kieran Egan, Simon Fraser University

If any teacher is tempted to abandon the arts in favor of focusing on raising test scores in rote ways, please read this book to renew your commitment to the imaginative and emotional needs of your students.

—Dee Dickinson, New Horizons for Learning Journal

….these heartfelt essays will give readers a new respect for the ‘heroic’ quality of a child’s imagination.

—Publishers Weekly

Richard Lewis knows kids already have imagination – in contrast to the many well-intentioned teachers who seem to think it has to be (and can be) instilled into them by formulaic exercises which only result in a jokey, false surrealism. Granted imagination can be squashed and almost wiped out, and may need to be restimulated even at an early age; but children should not be taught to identify poetry with verbal clowning. Such teachers need to absorb Lewis’ respect and high expectations for a child’s inner life and expressive capacities; it is clearly his attitude that has elicited so many remarkable poems from children of different ages, many living in grim inner-city neighborhoods. His work should be required reading for teachers and parents.

—Denise Levertov, poet and essayist, author of O Taste and See

Throughout this marvelous collection, the author leads us by example with his sensitive, softly embroidered prose, modeling a reverence for the unfolding of a child’s intelligence that is fast being buried under an avalanche of hype and hysteria concerning educational goals and standards…..A stirring defense of the wonder that is the birthright of every child. – Chris Mercolgiano, teacher and author of Teaching the Restless

…The language of poetry is Lewis’ medium, and….he places poems by well known masters with the writings of his students, making no distinction between them, illustrating the richness of children’s interior worlds.

—Lynn Neuman, Lincoln Center Institute

Parent’s Guide 2002 Classic Award for Outstanding Achievement in Parenting Materials