At the end of September, Matt Karlsen and I spoke to several groups in the Vancouver area about conditions that support playful inquiry. Over the last few years, educators in British Columbia and Alberta have shown a great deal of interest in Opal School’s work: it responds to their curiosity about the intersection of inquiry …
Read more “What does holding a strong image of the child mean in a complicated world?”
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King, Jr. In observance of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, we’ve had a long weekend. Much of Dr. King’s encouragement and inspiration ultimately challenges us all to speak up with, as our friend Vicki Vinton has written, with …
In my last blog post, I talked about the Hundred Languages, the many ways of knowing and expressing that belong to children. The schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy have given us what Vea Vecchi, who was the atelierista at the Diana Municipal Preschool in Reggio Emilia for 30 years, calls, “The Culture of the Atelier” …
Read more “The Culture of the Atelier – Connecting minds, hands, rationality and emotions”
Sparks connect together like a vine but the big pink flower is the idea that goes through the picture. The flowers grew together in my yard and one of them grew really big. It’s like the idea that grew from the others. The flowers naturally grew together because they sparked. And there was a big, …
In a beautiful place such as “Colorland” teachers have noticed, for many years now, that children’s imaginations take an especially lofty flight. At Opal School, such observations always lead us to wonder how we can support and sustain this kind of energy, engagement and joy in the service of the other kinds of learning we …
Halloween came and went, as it always does, and with it so did the lovely pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns that help define and symbolize this exciting and spooky holiday. We kept our pumpkins around for a few days longer, but when we returned from the weekend break both of our jack-o-lanterns were showing extreme signs of …
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 intentional and thinking about our thinking. Together with the children we’ve wondered: How do you have intentions but still stay open to possibilities? Are there chances to be surprised and …