After years of working with loose parts, I've come to realize that almost anything can be considered one. We've all seen the ubiquitous bits and pieces: string, glass beads, basket filler, wood scraps, tiles, etc. Like me, some teachers take a more natural approach by incorporating objects like pinecones, tree cookies, seed pods, flower petals,... Continue Reading →
Months and months ago, a fellow educator and advocate for outdoor play in Tennessee sent me a few ideas for blog posts. As I am wont to do, I hemmed and hawed over them for a long time, trying to find a way to organize them in my mind. With one of her prompts, she... Continue Reading →
Most preschool classrooms have "centers," and ours is no exception. In our inside space, we have an area for pretend play, an area for art, an area for reading and literacy exploration, an area for science, and an area for engineering, physics, and construction. We do our best to make sure that each of these... Continue Reading →
It isn't hard to imagine how Emergent Curriculum and the Reggio Way might go hand-in-hand. Letting students determine what they learn helps them feel empowered to direct the course of their own learning. It often confuses me that there aren't more schools out there that just bluntly ask students what they want to learn about. ... Continue Reading →
Rote learning works for some students, but it isn't for everybody. More traditional methods of teaching mathematics can sometimes be too abstract for some students, which leads to the ubiquitous belief that they are "bad at math." Because each student engages with mathematics a little bit differently, it makes sense to investigate mathematics in a... Continue Reading →
Reggio educators often talk about defining learning in terms of a journey instead of assessing it based on the achievement of a predetermined goal. And while it sounds like a noble pursuit, process-focused teaching methods can sometimes cause tremendous discomfort for teachers (myself included). Determining the efficacy of our teaching methods without a determinant start... Continue Reading →
There is a wealth of powerful scientific data that points to the fact that children learn better in environments that are not highly decorated. Particularly for Reggio educators, there has been a large push-back against the brightly colored, plastic furniture and learning materials that were so common when I was a child. In general, I... Continue Reading →
I'll come clean: as a kid, I didn't get math. I was generally able to follow instructions and produce the answers my teachers were looking for, but on the whole it seemed totally arbitrary to me. I was never quite sure how it impacted me and what it had to do with my day-to-day life... Continue Reading →
My uncle recently returned to the United States from China to visit my family. His jet-lag and our early morning schedule led to quite a few discussions over 5:00 am coffee. During one such conversation, he mentioned that he had recently been appointed the Program Director of a brand new conservation center in Shangri-la, Tibet.... Continue Reading →
On April 10th, 1899, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. gave a speech in which he reflected upon what he believed to be the ideal American lifestyle: "I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest... Continue Reading →
Without Windows 