Little Big Minds
Sharing Philosophy with Kids
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A guide for parents and educators to sharing the enduring ideas of the biggest minds throughout the centuries—from Plato to Jane Addams—with the "littlest" minds.
Children are no strangers to cruelty and courage, to love and to loss, and in this unique book teacher and educational consultant Marietta McCarty reveals that they are, in fact, natural philosophers. Drawing on a program she has honed in schools around the country over the last fifteen years, Little Big Minds guides parents and educators in introducing philosophy to K-8 children in order to develop their critical thinking, deepen their appreciation for others, and brace them for the philosophical quandaries that lurk in all of our lives, young or old.
Arranged according to themes-including prejudice, compassion, and death-and featuring the work of philosophers from Plato and Socrates to the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr., this step-by-step guide to teaching kids how to think philosophically is full of excellent discussion questions, teaching tips, and group exercises.
Customer Reviews
Great Philosophy Book for All
This is a great book, whether you’re working with kids and want a way to get them to think differently about the world, or if you’re just interesting in philosophy. Either way, by the time you finish this book, you’ll want to find some kids and have a proper philosophical conversation. Not to mention, the cover is absolutely adorable.
I genuinely appreciated that she included a wonderful balance of Western and Eastern philosophy, as well as including plenty of female philosophers. This is definitely not your standard Western Philosophy 101 book, but maybe this is how we should be teaching philosophy to people of all ages. This book tied in will with my own explorations is Eastern Philosophy. I have a whole new reading list of Buddhist philosophers now, thanks to this book. It has also reignited my love for Søren Kierkegaard. This book is a true philosophical gem.
My only real issue with this book was that it had a massive problem with not putting spaces between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. It seems this is such a simple thing and most word processing programs in 2006 (when the book was written) certainly would have either done that automatically or would have alerted the author and/or editor to it. It’s rampant. Someone really needs to go in and fix this. To a lesser extent, there is also an issue with a space existing between the last word of a sentence and it’s punctuation. Again, I don’t know how this got through editing with such basic and glaring errors.