Opal School Blog
Articulating our intentions
Opal School has two primary classrooms, Maple and Magnolia, which include kindergartners, first graders, and second graders. The teachers from the two classrooms function as a…
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A Sneak-Peek Into Our Intentions
The Beginning School Team sent this letter to parents before the first day of the 2016-2017 school year. We’d love to hear the reflections of Opal School…
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The Gift of the Atecocolli
We are excited to have Alfredo Quiahuitl Villegas here for Summer Symposium 2016. This post, originally written in February of 2013, captures a memory of…
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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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Transformational Leadership
Last week, a post from Erin Dunn Baker showed how one teacher’s experience at Opal School influenced inquiry with the third graders she works with. Here,…
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Making pickles
Opal School exists not only to influence its immediate community: It lives to provoke change far and wide. We know that our workshops catalyze change –…
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In This Tree Lives Hope
In the Magnolia Classroom community, the children have been focused on developing and learning to appreciate their connection to the natural world. They are practicing strategies…
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It’s not about the towers, either
I start this post with a shout out to Allie Pasquier, whose recent Bakers and Astronauts post catalyzed this one. Her post examined how the…
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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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