Earlier this morning, Esther Karasenty watched her preschool class stare down the world’s tallest mountain without leaving our flat-as-a-pancake city.
Base camp was actually a residential construction site. The mountain — it was a pile of sand, found during a walk in the Seafair neighbourhood of their Shalom Preschool classroom.
“Children here are not used to climbing trees,” says Karasenty in a post-preschool conversation on miniature chairs. “So, they climbed this mountain and it was really hard for them. When they reached the top you should have seen them. It was like Everest or Kilimanjaro—they just conquered it.”
Karasenty is the manager and teacher of Shalom Preschool, a 30-year institution based at Beth Tikvah Synagogue in Richmond. Children, she says, learn through their senses. That’s why she encourages play with simple things, such as air, water, dirt — and sand piles.
Karasenty grew up in Israel and remembers her own childhood fondly: “A lot of nature, we played outside, we had a milkman who delivered the milk home. It was an amazing life. Israel is beautiful.”
But after living in the Middle Eastern country for three decades, a suicide bomb attack near her home in Tel Aviv prompted her to leave. Work took her around the world, including Brazil, her last home before moving here 12 years ago.
“The demands are very high on children in Brazil. Mostly they don’t have a childhood over there,” says Karasenty, a mom of six. “It’s high security, and it’s very stressful for the children.”
Neither she nor her husband had visited Canada before deciding to move here. They researched “the best place to raise children” on the Internet and found Richmond.
The multilingual mom began teaching at Beth Tikvah’s Hebrew School, and was later invited to help at the preschool. Without a background in teaching children, Karasenty went back to class herself, earning qualifications in early childhood education, infant and toddler instruction and in teaching special needs students in early childhood settings. She’s now pursuing a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education.
“It’s fascinating. Children’s brains amaze me,” she says. “Learning is something that’s in you to do. A child is born with the willingness to learn. It’s just who (they are). I don’t see myself as someone who is going to teach children. I’m more coaching children.”
Karasenty loves learning and reads in Hebrew, English, Portuguese and Spanish. Books of interest range from studies of children with special needs to biographies to her current read, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book on the impact of rare events, The Black Swan. (“It’s about economics. I like math as well so it fits in.”)
As a preschool teacher, Karasenty has a particular focus on social and emotional learning — believing that a socially healthy and emotionally resilient child will be a natural and inquisitive learner. Children learn by themselves, she says, but they also have needs. She aims to help children express them.
“A child doesn’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘Oh I’m going to turn my parents’ day into a disaster.’ They don’t say that, they just have needs. If you understand a child’s needs, then you can help them,” she says. “They’re human beings. They’re short, but they’re human beings.”
Shalom Preschool is named with the Hebrew word for welcoming, farewell and peace, and it’s open to learners from age two to five. Other schools separate children by age, but Karasenty believes children grow in an environment of different ages and abilities. They learn from each other, help each other and develop empathy, she says.
They also learn from others — people and sand piles — while exploring the neighbourhood.
“I try to make the children know the people around here so they feel a part of the community. It’s something that’s disappearing here in Richmond — the sense of community. When we walk on the path we say ‘hi’ to the people who pass by. Sometimes people stop to talk to us.”
