Book Review: Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood

One thing that I absolutely love about my school is the culture of collaboration. Our most recent endeavor is a preschool teachers’ book club!

Our first book was Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood: Practical Parenting from Birth to Six Years. Even though the book is geared for parents, it is also great for teachers who routinely work with young ones. It explains lots of techniques that work well with this age group, like giving the kids lots of options to foster a sense of self control, using empathy, and immediately giving consequences. What I liked is that the book gives a few simple formulas that can be applied to many situations. Sometimes there is simply too much going on in the classroom to focus on creating a learnable moment from misbehavior, but having a set of often-used phrases can make it easier to address these situations quickly and calmly.

My favorite part of the book talks about getting kids to take responsibility for their actions through an ‘energy drain’. This works for about any misbehavior. For example, if two students are being unkind to one another I might say, “Those unkind words just drained a lot of energy out of our classroom. How are you going to put it back?” The students can then think of a logical consequence for themselves. If they are unable to think of an appropriate consequence I can give them several options to choose from. The beauty is that in either situation the students are given the task of thinking of or choosing a consequence and following through on their own. Awesome!