Know more about Totto-Chan's school 😊

Randomly presenting to you some of my favorite portions from the book Totto-Chan. Ready to relish?!😍

Tomoe and Nature

• How beautiful it is to have the entrance gate of the school made of tree branches 🌴 in place of the same boring concrete stuff 😕
• In the age of school advertisement trips to NASA 🙍 and the like, how inspiring it would have  been for Tomoe kids to attend farming classes conducted by a farmer himself 🌾
• Every child in the school has his or her own tree which they invite their friends to 🌲 How lovely it is to own your place in tune with nature 🎇
• Mr. Kobayashi always called his daughter for a walk saying "...lets go and look for rhythms in relationship with the nature..." 🌺 This is the kind of human-nature relationship that existed in the school.

Tomoe and child-centric environment

• Can anyone imagine a school with a TOTAL strength of 50?!!!! 😊 That was Tomoe 💛
• We do see schools painted like trains 🚆, but Tomoe's classrooms were real trains 😇 How excited it was for both children and their parents to imagine how a new classroom arrived one night!💕 Each one of us would have felt to had been a part of that event. 😊
• While we see parents and school being particular about uniforms and its neatness, Kobayashi did away with it. In addition he also insisted children to wear torn clothing saying "...shame for children to worry about clothes getting dirty.." Lol.. Today's schools 👎 have a looooottt to learn from this man.
• How important were children to him!!! 👦👧 Even during war-time starvation across Japan, he made sure that children intake nutritious meals every single day.🍛 Most importantly, their school song🎤 had nothing to do with anything stereotypical 😏. Instead, it was on "how to eat food for a healthy living". Isn't this unique and important to take a note of?!!
• Children in this school had the freedom of choosing subjects to learn in a day in the order of their liking 🙌 No time-table, lesson-plan or structured syllabi 😻

To be continued... 💝 as I would like to give you time to imagine the above 😊, regret for not having experienced such stuff 😞, nor able to give the same to your kids😕 and to see what could be done to make a change at a minimal level 🙋.