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...

Kids love their routines, but the weather changes had all of us on our toes this week: snow and ice, warm breezes, and even a dramatic thunderstorm that sent our kids inside from recess. I love how all of the kids just roll with the changes. They pile on the layers, tr...

We have two weeks worth of school happenings to condense into our blog this week. It's a big job, but we'll do our best to give you some accurate snapshots and some of the highlights.

Cheryl's PreK Reflections

The preschool got to continue their tour of our school's comm...

Learning through play is a big part of what we do at our school. Children roll dice to collect ones, turn those ones into tens, and eventually turn their tens into hundreds. They role play "store" and exchange money for acorns or fruit or fancy sticks. We act out diffe...