Community is at the heart of early childhood education. We rely on our classroom community to connect with one other, to create positive learning environments, to enrich programming, to build and foster strong relationships, and to deepen our understanding of identity and cultural knowledge. By building community in our Kindergarten, students take risks and persevere when faced with a challenge.
Continue reading A Kindergarten Classroom in a Global Pandemic?
As I continue to work on my tenure self-study project, I reflect on my journey so far and think about where I’m headed. Continue reading Play as a Point of Entry for Learning
“Taking a walk in someone else’s shoes,” is one of the more common ways of explaining what it means to show empathy. In addition to being a tired way of making sense of a concept with perhaps the most powerful consequences for humanity, my recent engagement in a yoga training has me questioning the usefulness of this expression. I’ve come to understand that the best way to cultivate empathy is to stay firmly planted, and fully present, in my own shoes. Continue reading Filling-up My Skin (and My Shoes): Reconsidering Empathy so That I Can Teach It
The news ruined my curriculum planning.
My plan was to continue our medieval Humanities studies by learning more about Feudalism and Christianity in Europe for the remainder of the second quarter. Then, after Winter Break, we would dive in to the origins of Islam and study the Middle East. But the news of the bombings in France could not be ignored. Continue reading Global Shift
The middle school is out this week. Everyone. While it is eerily quiet in the building, there is a constant stream of photos posting to the middle school trips twitter page attesting to the rich experiences and full days of the students in each grade. Continue reading Why Go Out?
This is a guest post from Monica Snellings (@InquiringMonica). The original posts can be found here and here.
Mark Silberberg, middle school principal at LREI (and a big supporter of Inquiring Minds), integrated our lesson, My Future Self, into a class on values. The student’s schedule for this class is only once a week so getting 5th graders to retain their focus and stick with this provocative thought experiment took some ingenuity on his part. Continue reading Considering Their Future Selves
With all of the activity underway in the Middle School, the winter break seems a distant memory. This week, we were host to a contingent of educators from South Korea who were interested in learning more about our approach to science education and progressive pedagogy. Continue reading Happiness Education
