Our kids are all about working their way into the ground - they've been digging up our garden, learning about sap in maple trees, and planting flowers for the butterfly and hummingbird garden in town. We use lots of nature metaphors for our kids, asking them to plant t...

When I mentioned that we were in a new month at circle time on Monday, a few of our kids immediately chimed in with, "March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb." This garnered some really confused looks from many of the other children, so we talked about what it m...

Over the past two weeks of school, we've had lots to celebrate - a good tonic to some February cabin fever. We shared some love with all of our school friends on Valentine's day. We've had snow, mud, and sunshine to play in. We went on field trips to the New York State...

One recent morning I came over to a group of kids building towers out of Kapla blocks, and they told me they were building them for one of our PreK kids to knock down. They explained, "He really likes to knock them down. It makes him really happy, so we let him know as...

"Hands-On Learning" has been a catch phrase during most of my time as an educator. It makes sense that children learn from doing - when they mix colors over and over again, they learn that red and blue make purple. When they listen to a bird call, look up pictures of t...

I was waxing on about looking closely back in October, but it bears repeating. It's something that we ask our kids to do every day and all the time. We want them to look closely at a math problem so that they can have the "That doesn't make sense!" moment when their ca...

We had a week of testing at our school, but it wasn't the standardized testing that can make some of us wince. Kids were testing their senses, testing mouse traps, testing language, and testing our community to see if it is welcoming and fair. From science experiments...

I love the winter holiday season, but I admit that I hit a moment near the end of the whirlwind of parties and family and friends and food where all I want to do is get back to school. A bunch of our kids mentioned similar feelings as we settled back in this week. We l...

I was struck this week by the momentum of our learners. They get their hands sunk into a project, and they just want to keep going. We do our best to make space for that and often have staggered transitions to allow individuals to take a few extra minutes to finish up...

After our Thanksgiving holiday and two snow days to start this week, everyone was pretty excited to finally be back in school. "It was so boring," griped one child. "I'm so glad we're back!" It feels like we are solidly in winter though we have talked about how the sol...