Foraging for Words

Kathleen McMillan explores the idea of "Foraging for Words" in order to nourish the observation and communication skills of children.

This clip is part of a talk given by Kathleen McMillan, children's educator and author of BlueBeary, as the keynote speaker at an Early Childhood Education conference at Columbia Bible College in Abbotford, BC in November 2009.

TRANSCRIPT:

The reason I like words is because I think words are like—there’s a verse that I like: “a fit word is like apples of gold in settings of silver.” When you teach children beautiful words and words that describe things well, you’re giving them the opportunity to create something beautiful in their language. So I encourage you: talk, talk, talk, talk to the kids all the time. Sing and read and present new words. Don’t be afraid.

In my book I present the word forage. Does everybody know what the word forage means? It’s quite amazing, actually, sometimes I find that people don’t really think of it as a word that they understand. But I think of foraging as, well, you know what it means—gathering, gathering food generally. But when we are talking to children we can forage through the wealth of words that are out there and we can gather them and we can present them to them and we can feed them on those words.