Recently my first-grade class celebrated “Stuffie Day,” a bi-annual convention of treasured stuffed animals including, but not limited to, a five-foot tall bear, an orange Hobbes cat, and a bunny lovey. Unfortunately, the bunny lovey (pink, well worn) vanished during 5th period on a Friday. Any parent will acknowledge the gravitas of this. After a tense weekend, the bunny was recovered near Bragdon Wood by several Early Childhood teachers and returned to its gladdened owner.  

Found and lost toys. Bits of treasure turned up on the playground. House Head rewards. Tiny keyrings. Rainbow Loom bracelets. Stickers, stickers, and more stickers. Regardless of the school’s prohibition on toys from home, an undercurrent of plush and plastic jetsam flows through the halls of Building 1 every day. It’s enough to make you scream – and yet. The recovered bunny lovey is the Velveteen Rabbit, the toy made alive by the love of a child.  

Charlotte Mason, 19th century British educator, presents children’s astonishing affection for all things as further evidence that they are “born persons” arriving in the classroom with their hearts “thoroughly furnished” (43). Children do not need to be taught to love. Mason continues,  

Can any of us love like a little child? Father and mother, sister and brothers, neighbors and friends, “our” cat and “our" dog, the wretchedest stump of a broken toy, all come in for his lavish tenderness. How generous and grateful he is, how kind and simple, how pitiful and how full of benevolence in the strict sense of goodwill, how loyal and humble, how fair and just! (43).  

How many times have I observed this “lavish tenderness” alive and at work in my classroom, and how humbled I am by the eloquence with which Charlotte Mason frames it for me, who can be so impatient and quick to brush away the insistent tenderness of children. Their affection for this “wretchedest stump of a broken toy” is evidence of their heart, their humanness. Today a student asked me staple together a booklet of construction paper, which she had labeled, “Book of Stickers.” The first two: Valentine’s Day hearts.  

Toys are just one frontier of a child’s furnished heart. During prayer time, first-graders have asked for prayer for their cats, their dogs, their moms, their friend’s moms, their baby cousins, and sick friends in our school community. Over and over this year, I have been moved by the swift impulse of their affections towards each other and God. “Pray!” one student exclaimed when the grandfather from Tomie de Paola’s sensitive Now One Foot, Now the Other, fell ill with a stroke. Mason writes, “We elders hardly realize how real his prayers are to a child” (44). We elders hardly realize a lot of things, hovering as we are at the edge of things, our attention faltering, our spirits low.  

In this season of uncertainty, hurt, and doubt, I am humbled by the example of love and prayerfulness I have observed from the children under my care. I looked through the window into the rose garden, and I heard the children laughing. Charlotte Mason asked, “Can any of us love like a little child?” With God’s help, we must. We must become like them, pray like them, forgive like them, and learn like them, or we shall never enter the kingdom. 

Mason, Charlotte. A Philosophy of Education. Living Book Press, 2017.