Surprising Destinations ― A Guide to Essential Learning in Early Childhood

Developing a sense of adventure in learning can make all the difference between teaching incipient lifelong learners or struggling with apathetic students. In this engaging book, Mary Glover and Beth Giacalone recount how a buddy-reading project between preschoolers and first/second graders became a yearlong vehicle for developing multiple literacies, life values, and enthusiasms of all sorts. They provide a glimpse of early childhood education at its best.

Surprising Destinations offers a model for a refreshing, thought-provoking approach to early childhood curriculum that integrates art, science, gardening, celebrations, intergenerational program involvement, community service projects, and human rights study. Incorporating a year's worth of ideas, suggestions, survival tips, and vignettes, it shows how "buddy study" time nurtures literacy in the traditional and broader human sense - how it emphasizes humanitarian qualities of respectfulness, kindness, compassion, and responsibility. You'll see how these two classes of children ended up being buddies in greater ways than even the teachers envisioned. And the surprising and joyful destinations they ultimately reached reveal what can happen when curriculum and teaching practices support this kind of learning.

At a time of deep educational unrest and standards-driven curriculums, Glover and Giacalone offer an alternative to our collective vision of schooling, inviting other educators to work together, reflect on their teaching practices, and pursue interests as teacher researchers.

Beth Giacalone is the assistant director and a preschool teacher at Awakening Seed School in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned her Bachelors degree in Psychology from University of Texas at El Paso in 1989 and a Masters degree in Education from Arizona State University in 1998. Her daughter attends the school. Outside of school, Beth is an avid reader, musician and gardener.

Mary Glover completed her Master of Arts degree in Elementary Education at Arizona State University in 1988. Seeking an alternative education for her two young daughters, she co-founded Awakening Seed School in Tempe, Arizona in 1977 where she is currently the director and fourth/fifth grade teacher. Mary has taught preschool through fifth grade during her 24 years as a teacher. In addition to her work as a teacher and administrator, she is a poet and an artist.