Opal School Blog
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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Inspiration
With all of our talk with Opal 2 students in this first month of school about intentions, some questions have come up about the process of being…
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The Power of Reflection
Lella Gandini, who serves as the liaison between the schools of Reggio Emilia and the United States, has made several visits to our Portland, Oregon area schools. …
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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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Sneak Peeks
In the beginning of the school year we work hard to turn a classroom of 20 students and two teachers into a successful learning community. We…
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Launching Writer’s Notebooks
Written by Mary Gage Davis As the school year began, children in Opal 3 worked for days carefully crafting maps to capture their summers, the…
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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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