Missy Hamilnook Reflects: on early childhood education

Missy Hamilnook Reflects is a memoir about twenty years as an early childhood educator with both at-risk and normally developing children in the preschool of a university speech and hearing clinic. Parents and those interested in early childhood education will find information of interest and value. The themes are the importance of play as the primary way to provide education for young children, and how that idea was translated into activities for them. Play is the work of the young child, and guided play with other children provides the foundation for symbolic thought in later years. Woven throughout this memoir are two other stories, the interface of a professional life with a personal world, and the impact of social change generated by the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Those two motifs will resonate with other women, other lives. Many photographs illustrate the preschool activities of children at play.