The natural beauty of autumn leaves and fall harvests continue to impact our early learners as we explore, create, and imagine outdoors in our forest and school garden. As a way to integrate children’s fascinations with all that comes with autumn our team has co-created some intentional learning explorations that also connect to our student’s developing… Read More Autumn Play and Learning Invitations
Before transforming our yard into our outdoor learning playspace, our early years team shared our hopes and dreams for the children in the space. We wanted it to provide opportunities for children to develop curiosity, exploration, creativity, innovation, resilience, problem-solving skills, risk-taking, collaboration, oral language skills, mathematical understanding, and connect with nature. We also kept… Read More Planning Outdoor Learning Playspaces For All Seasons
It’s exciting to reflect on the year gone by not only to support forward thinking for the new year, but also to appreciate precious moments and memories. My Top Nine Photos on Instagram of 2017. Handle: meljmaxwell Spatial Reasoning Provocation A clear plastic table cloth with Sharpie paint pen shapes drawn on it invites children… Read More Best Nine Photos of 2017 on Instagram
Many children share their excitement for the holiday season with us and we are equally enthusiastic to provide them with opportunity to encounter learning through invitations to play and learn with a holiday spin. Below are some of the festive playful learning experiences that we’ve offered where children can bump into literacy and math throughout… Read More Playful Christmas and Holiday Invitations to Learn
Subitizing is ability to instantly see or recognize how many without counting. It helps develop fluency in number sense and it supports further understanding of more elaborate counting(e.g., skip counting) and addition/subtraction. Douglas Clements says in Subitizing: What Is It? Why Teach It?, “Students can use pattern recognition to discover essential properties of numbers, such as… Read More Subitizing Experiences with Freebies
View our new spatial reasoning blog post: 10 Playful Spatial Reasoning Provocations Part 2 here. As our kindergarten team continues to learn more about children and their development in spatial thinking and reasoning, we are continually searching for and creating meaningful provocations and experiences where children can construct their own learning in this area. We are… Read More 10 Playful Spatial Reasoning Provocations
Hearts are something our early learners beg for all year long and not just on Valentine’s Day. We’re probably not alone either. Hearts are one of those shapes some little people crave to learn how to draw, and when they figure it out, they are unstoppable. We have one little this year that when asked what… Read More The Way to Their Heart Through Sensory and Loose Parts
Christmas and winter holidays awe children with their colours, lights, textures, smells, and sounds. We’ve decided to tap into this natural interest to encourage learning in math, science, engineering, fine-motor, sensory, literacy and art. Sensory Holiday Exploration We love how educators can intentionally add different materials to sensory exploration for different purposes. If we add… Read More 10 Christmas and Holiday Explorations
Children learn best from experiences and when given the opportunity to create their own math games children can become meaning-makers and construct their own knowledge and understanding. They become a partner in learning where their ideas are valued and tested. We value setting out math provocations that have an intentional focus: A place where children can… Read More Inviting Children to Create their own Math Games
Since the new Ontario Kindergarten Curriculum was released this summer our kindergarten team has spent some quality time reflecting and re-thinking how we document and organize this documentation with regards to the four frames. We’ve narrowed our scope of documentation to 4 main documentation formats and we’re sharing templates for you to use, tweak, improve upon, and share… Read More Documenting with the Four Frames
inspired by play 