Opal School Blog
A Dialogue with Hoyt Arboretum
by Caroline Wolfe, Lead Museum School Teacher "But too often and too quickly the leaves become leaf corpses far removed from the 'pulse of life'…
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Simple Materials, Complex Ideas
By Caroline Wolfe and Lauren Adams, Preschool teachers As educators, we believe that young children have the right to use a variety of materials that…
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Chapter Five: The Arts as Languages
Welcome to the concluding unit of Opal School Online! In this module, we focus on the arts as expressive languages. At Opal School, the use…
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Opal 2 Community Heart Map
Opal School has a collection of guiding principles for teaching and learning (that you can find here ) that support the ways we approach our…
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A Framework for Inquiry Based Project Work
This framework is one we use at Opal School to support the development of projects. We offer it to you to use in your settings…
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Literacy Studio
What is Literacy Studio? Literacy Studio is an approach to developing increasingly sophisticated reading and writing skills and attitudes through the application of the arts, lived experience,…
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Exploring Cardboard, Part 1
In the second week of school the students in Opal 3 were just beginning to explore how they might make hollow blocks for the youngers…
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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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