HYDE PARK — Gloria Needlman is giving away the secrets of early-childhood at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School in a new book.
Needlman, who taught kindergarten and nursery school for 34 years at Lab School, has captured her insights in a new book that she will read from at a 6 p.m. Sept. 14 at the Seminary Cooperative Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave.
The book, “It's Not Forsythia, It's for Me: My Years Teaching Young Children,” is geared towards parents and teachers who are looking for an inside look into the closed world of Lab, which is consistently rated the top private school in Chicago and one of the top in the country.
The school starts young with three-year-olds and Needlman talks about how she learned to get their imaginations firing. In one section, she describes how her husband built a crane for the classroom that each child had to be “licensed” to operate if they wanted to play with it.
“If any one of the safety rules was violated, the forgetting child’s license was revoked for a day,” Needlman writes. “By George, it worked! A former licensed kindergarten child as a 7th-grader stopped by the classroom to show me that he still carried his license with him, it being a bit worse for wear.”
The book is full of small vignettes of life in the classroom and discovering what engaged kids and kept them interested.
“I found some of my most creative curriculum came from scanning newspapers and magazines and choosing items that might spark the interest of children,” Needlman writes.
Needlman has taught hundreds of children, but is now retired.
