What brine do you soak in?
Exploring Opal School’s Goals and Expectations for Students: Part 1
September Stories
The We That I Am
Change
Keeping the Work Whole
So often in our society we view learning in pieces. Teaching and learning are viewed separately, as though somehow isolated from each other. Curriculum is broken into discrepant lesson plans to a degree that it obscures connections – across disciplines and between the classroom and the larger world. But the connections are there. They are there […]
Playing with Ideas
A “science talk” is a structure we use at Opal School to invite the children to play with ideas. It is intended to provoke thinking and to build shared understanding of a scientific question that we think the children might have some theories about. This structure is one of the ways we encourage children to […]
Evidence of Friendship
As a new community, one of the most important ways we build relationships and connections is through shared experiences. Field trips provide our community with a fresh opportunity to get out of the classroom and be together in ways we haven't been before. No matter what kinds of experiences each of us might have outside […]
Research
Over the past few weeks in Opal 2 we have been working together as a community to write agreements. Writing agreements is a process where the children are invited to construct ideas of how they want to be together this year. At Opal School, we don't start with a list of rules or teacher made […]