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Classroom Schedules (and a note about math)
For those who are interested, you can see here how teachers choose to organize their time over the course of a week: Download OpalPreschoolSchedule Download…
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Organizing for Assessment
The Goals and Expectations (download here: Download OpalOnline_Article_GoalsExpectations )for student learning go hand-in-hand with the school's values and guiding principles. The perennial questions are: How can…
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Connecting with a Museum Exhibit
The following was written by Marcy Berkowitz and Nicole Simpson, Early Kindergarten teachers: Being housed in the Portland Children's Museum has many more benefits and opportunities…
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Planning for Inspiration
In this follow-up to her article, The Role of Intention, Kerry Salazar contemplates issues at the heart of decisions leading to negotiated, emergent, or prescribed…
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Children as Researchers of Their Own Learning
By Susan Harris MacKay Not too many years ago, a group of 7 – 9 year olds, my co-teachers and I created a bug museum.…
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Celebrations: Stone Soup
The social life of the learning community is incomplete if it doesn’t include celebration, festivity, and fantasy. All these are integral parts of the human…
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The Running Space – a collaborative experience and poem
The Running Space Running up hill and then down, and then up hill, and then down the hill, and then up . . . Picking…
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Researching Relationships
In this article, teacher Caroline Wolfe provides an example of her thinking as a teacher-researcher, actively working to develop connections between theory and practice, asking…
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Brain Buddies
What are the benefits of collaboration? Children’s perspectives Opal students know they are part of a larger project. They know people visit their classrooms and…
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The Role of Intention
In the following article, Opal School Teacher-Researcher Kerry Salazar gives us a sense of the approach a teacher-researcher might use to engage in intentional design…
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