As my colleagues and I continued to think together about our big idea of transformation and some of our research questions, we wondered what materials might lend themselves to playing with this big idea. Wire came to mind as a material to explore together: it is easily transformed, offering these young children a concrete experience …
Read more “The Secrets of Wire: Play, Reflection and Relationships with Risk”
When I first began as an assistant teacher long ago, I attended a parent meeting at the school on the topic of young children and writing. I remember someone sharing that their 4 year old child didn’t write but scribbled. The teacher shared that scribbling (and other mark-making) IS writing — a necessary stepping stone …
In the days before the children arrived at school, my colleagues and I considered how to prepare the classroom environments and we developed our intentions for the year. We wondered together about the role that risk plays in the big idea of transformation, our intention for this school year. We wondered… What is the relationship between …
What is possible when we invite parents and teachers together to create shared meaning of our goals and expectations for children? What connections, stories and perspectives will emerge through this shared process? What might happen if we offer parents the assessment tools and resources used by the teachers when paying attention to children? How …
Read more “Partnering with Families – Sharing resources for shared meaning-making”
For many young children, preschool is their first experience in being a part of a community outside of their family community. In bringing a group of people together, it offers opportunities to connect and to encounter a diverse array of ways of being and approaching the world. It also offers children endless opportunities to deepen and broaden …
In the last few weeks, children in Preschool have discovered, encountered and collected many different types of seeds: within beans pods brought from a child's garden, in dissecting the fruit during lunch, stuck to the legs of our pants after a hike, on a trail below a tree, on the stem of a picked dandelion. . …
The Running Space Running up hill and then down, and then up hill, and then down the hill, and then up . . . Picking grass . . . a whole bunch Awesome Running down Falling Down Bald eagle Down hill Action Running Space Fly, fly, fly, I was determined to fly Following, talking Mixing …
Read more “The Running Space – a collaborative experience and poem”
As educators we believe that young children have the right to use a variety of materials that facilitate opportunities for exploration, experimentation, discovery and creation. The first studio invitation of the school year was offering the children two simple materials, blue construction paper and masking tape, with an open-ended invitation to discover what might happen …
The intention of our blog posts is to build connections between Opal School's pedagogy and what this actually looks like and sounds like in the evolving, organic life of the classroom. We will share images, stories and dialogues from the classroom as well as our work as Teacher-Researchers – our observations, questions, and reflections. Our hope …
"But too often and too quickly the leaves become leaf corpses far removed from the 'pulse of life' which ought not to be lost during the course of investigation, whether in drawing, natural sciences, or other." ~Vea Vecchi A goal and expectation for Opal students is to "pay attention to nature as a mindful …