Susan Harris MacKay
Setting Expectations
As I stepped into the first Day of school in our Cottonwood classroom (children ages 5-7 years), Lauren was just introducing a surprising material to…
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Materials as Metaphors
My recent post, Say What You Mean, began as this post — but I got so tangled up in thinking about the relationship between knowledge…
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Say What you Mean
We’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it.…
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Constructing Identity
Because it’s Opal 4, we knew we would deeply explore the complexities of perspective this year. Because it was a presidential election year, we knew…
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Dear Future School
It’s that time of year when our oldest students start seriously thinking about the schools they’ll go to next. These transitions are always bittersweet. It’s so…
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Is it playful inquiry?
Matt and I have been puzzling over this photo this week. Is this moment of questions posed and children deep into their research and writing…
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Being Safe to Risk
What lives between the comfort zone and the danger zone? It’s a place where you feel safe to risk. It’s the zone we work to…
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Public Gardens
As a big fan of the work of both Alison Gopnik and Peter Gray, a post written recently by the latter about a new book, The…
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Sharing Strawberries
In the spring, because our third graders had become so engaged with statistics of our global population, we decided to share some of the Material World…
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All under one roof
To readers of Opal School Online, it might be easy to forget that Opal School was a project of the Portland Children’s Museum. To Portland…
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