Child-led Learning

I've read a lot about child-led learning lately on the web.  Sometimes it seems like topics like this come in waves, and every once in awhile everyone's talking about the same topic.  Child-led learning is something that means different things to different folks.  It's a continuum, of sorts, from completely free school approach to generally considering the children's interests in your planning.

I've had 3 kids, and the only advice I've ever been able to give a mother about labor is twofold:
1. Prepare and plan for every possible detail, and then to be ready to throw the entire plan out the window in the moment.  
2. Trust your body.  It is capable of more than you might expect.

Today, it occurred to me that this is much like the process of child-led learning, as far as how we do it here.

We write a curriculum, that is centered around themes and is both arts-based and nature-based.  We plan for every day, including art and science choices, morning and afternoon choices, our homesteading/small group projects, and details of our circle time together.  However, we are open to the ideas the children bring. This may come in many different forms, such as: 

1. The children choosing to "take it to another level" as my good friend and wise mentor displays
2. Several children may spend the week talking about space and rockets, so we decide to work it into our curriculum by expanding our month of "light"
3. The weather may have changed our physical environment, and at the suggestion of one kid, we completely re-vamp our morning, so we can do what he suggested
4. Often, the kids have song and story requests at circle time, and we try to honor as many of those as we can
5. A child notices that the curtains to our closet have broken, so we talk about what to do: can we fix them or do we need to make new ones? Can we use what we have to make new ones? New ones become the homesteading project of that child's small group.
6. Four of our preschooler have a new baby at their house, so part of our LOVE theme becomes Love in our Families.

As we move forward in this journey together, we gain more and more trust in each other.  Teachers learn to trust that an idea a child has is worthy of responding to in a big way.  By this, I mean not just responding verbally, but honoring that child's creativity by making his/her idea into a project or an activity, or even a theme.  In doing this, we are teaching the children to trust us, too.  They are learning to trust that we will listen to them, we will take their ideas seriously, we will honor their minds.