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 …
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 …
Read more “Inventiveness emerges through the tangles found in play”
“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 …
With January’s fickle weather, it felt like we were never going to settle back into our regular school and home routines. After the winter break, in the spattered days we attended school, I could see the children trying to reconnect to established friendships, trying to rekindle the bridges they had been growing in their new relationships – …
Teacher: I had a connection and wanted to bring this word back into our conversations. It actually came up first when we were thinking about bikes. The word is balance. What comes to mind when you think of balance? We begin a list on the white board as children share: weight – lightness/heaviness strength you’ll …
In second and third grade this year, the “big idea” we are studying is the concept of interdependence. This idea of each living thing having its place in a system that relies on it and that it relies on can be studied through almost anything. We have begun to study it through the world of insects. …