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 …
As children journey through Opal 1 and Opal 2, they spend a lot of time considering with their teachers and their peers the ways in which we depend on each other in this world. What is a community? What is our relationship to the natural world? “The we that …
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”
In preschool we try to offer as many experiences as possible for our whole group to come together to share and listen to each other’s ideas. After a trip to the farmer’s market we had one of our first reflection meetings in order to have this exchange of thoughts, memories and connections with one another’s …
Materials, they can draw you in to look more closely. They can draw you in to touch them, interact with them, …play and dance with them! Children’s attraction to a material can invite them to approach and explore within the arts, to begin a dialog with materials, to begin to think and communicate through using them. Materials offer …
Read more “The Power of Materials: A Group’s First Exploration into Foil”
Sometimes “Highlights” and “Ask Me About” just can’t capture the week. We need pictures! Historically Accurate Play in Opal 4 has moved – geographically and chronologically. We are now in the city of Boston in the year 1775. The first invitation into this new time and place was a map study of a few historical …
A few months ago, it was hard to open a newspaper or turn on the radio without running into Paul Tough and his book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (see, for example, this episode of This American Life.) As the title suggests, the book highlights the fundamental relationship between …