Intermediate
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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Finding a Path to Productive Disagreement: Reflecting on our Response to Uncertainty and Confusion
When I think about the Opal 3 community, I find and feel evidence of tremendous growth as a community: we are more cohesive and…
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Children will tell you what they want. If you listen, they might show you what they need
In my last blog post, I reflected on Opal’s 3’s experience of getting their writer’s notebooks, a process which I hoped would help them see themselves…
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Growing and Celebrating Writers
A writing life is a life with all the windows and doors open * * * * * * * -Julia Alvarez Ideas are all…
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Pressing the Reset Button
As teachers we are continuously reflecting upon promoting healthy and productive classroom cultures. In designing experiences for children, we consider what we know about optimal…
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Imagine All of Us Coming Together to Wonder
The beginning of the school year marks a time of wonder: What will this class of children be like? Where will our studies, interests, and…
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Setting Intentions for Our Year Together – Intermediate Team
Opal School has two intermediate classrooms, Opal 3 & 4, which include third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders. In many ways, the teachers from the two classrooms function as a…
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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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What brine do you soak in?
Students in Opal 4 have been working to seek connections between some of their experiences in Opal 4 this year, the questions we’ve been exploring…
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The Power of Illusion
The opinion piece is a famously third grade writing assignment. It is, in fact, Common Core English Language Arts Standard 3.1: “Write opinion pieces…
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