Glimpses into the first week
When people come to visit Opal School, we often hear the question, “What does all of this look like in the beginning of the year? How do you start?” And really, that can feel tricky to respond to, because it never looks just the same as it did before. New children, new families, new teachers, […]
Building nests together
Opal School has a long relationship with Alise Shafer Ivey and Pedagogical Institute of Los Angeles. We’ve admired and contributed to the important work that they’ve led with teachers in Los Angeles and Nest centers serving young refugees in Greece, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and, now, the US/Mexico border. Here, we offer insights […]
Materials In All Phases of The Writing Process
The kindergarten and first grade children in Cottonwood have been preparing to publish stories about characters that they invented and developed over time. These characters include hummingbirds, snapping turtles, crabs, ladybugs, deer, a peach, many different kinds of owls, and even a hiker named “Mikey Hikey.” In the early stages of writing, the children were […]
Listening With Intention to Go Big
The weeks leading up to Winter Break provide teachers with a unique opportunity to pause and reflect on the work that our learning communities have been so immersed in. Our recent staff meetings have been structured to support this processing. We have been exploring how we might support the children in our respective learning communities […]
Working Within Our Intentions
At the beginning of this year, we posted the intentions letter that we craft to focus our attention, activate our eyes and ears as the children play with new ideas, and offer opportunities insights towards next steps. As a teaching team, we worked to craft a big question that will serve us through our journey. Taking […]
Play, school, and the future of jobs
As much as I find good reason to treat anything that comes out of Davos with a measured dose of skepticism – and as resistant as I am to describe the function of schools as a workforce delivery mechanism – I find the periodic Future of Jobs Report to be provocative. As the World Economic […]
Unpacking Compassion
“Empathy is a gateway to compassion. It’s understanding how someone feels, and trying to imagine how that might feel for you — it’s a mode of relating. Compassion takes it further. It’s feeling what that person is feeling, holding it, accepting it, and taking some kind of action.” – Lori Chandler My colleagues and I […]
Reflecting on Leaning In With Curiosity (Part Two)
In my last post, I told the first part of our story of using Playful Inquiry to create conditions for children to lean into making sense of the world with curiosity rather than judgment, to accept and seek out complexity, and to develop empathy and understanding for people and perspectives different from their own through interactive […]
Inventiveness emerges through the tangles found in play
At a recent meeting Opal teachers were asked to reflect on the ways invention has emerged in their respective learning communities this year. Using a resource describing dimensions of invention education at Opal School crafted with Project Zero’s Ben Mardell and Mara Krechevsky (who will be sharing this work at our Summer Symposium), we revisited the […]
Love, Play, and Mail
“In play, children begin with their own set of premises and learn to follow through, step-by-step, scene by scene in the complex process of creating a logical and literary dramatic project of their own.” – Vivian Paley, The Importance of Fantasy, Fairness, and Friendship in Children’s Play The Cottonwood community of kindergarteners and first-graders has […]