As educators how do we nurture kindness in everyday social interactions when we know that a kind word or act will impact others. I believe that this needs to be intentional, mindful, and like many of my friends, a choice. I was browsing the books in my colleague and friend Alex King's room and noticed the book A World of Kindness which had been on my short list for the next VIRL visit. A beautiful and thoughtful book, it shares a strong yet simple message about everyday acts of kindness that we as educators hope to model and nurture in the children.   Noticing how kind my friend Alex is to me and all of the people whose lives touch hers, I decided to reflect upon my own thinking and actions around kindness. As an educator, Kindness, Patience and Time has been a big part of my program. During a recent visit to the Reggio Emilia Early Learning Centres in Italy, these values were evident in the kind, respectful and nurturing approach that the Reggio educators used...

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Photo from Kindergarten Kindergarten The children have been playing with complex patterns this month as the student teachers practice lessons and provide learning opportunities.  Yesterday we introduced a new game which provided an opportunity for children to read and extend their partners complex pattern. Partner A builds the core and copies it one time, Partner B extends the pattern. Then they switch and begin again. ...

          Yesterday I was chatting with my very capable and enthusiastic student teachers about how powerful writing workshop is and that one of my favourite aspects of this research based open ended framework is that it allows students to work at their personal best. Here is what we are doing right now.... While the children have been practicing the letter names and sounds as well as using that knowledge to create small words I decided that we should add some of those words to a word wall. We are continuing with our writing every day. Most days the children are choosing their own stories but occasionally we create a story connected to Social Studies or Science (i.e.: What animals live in our forest?). I have changed their writing paper to include two writing boxes. I co-created an anchor chart with the children which included our writing criteria and we added about twenty words which are usually in their stories like:  log, sun, tree, bug, ant,....  Then I a...