photo from creativity project When we believe that children are capable, creative and valued we design a classroom that reflects these values and see what happens. A user friendly classroom, with open shelving, includes visual space around materials and everything on the shelves available to the children.  The art materials are on sorting trays for the children to carry to the table for easy set up however they can mix and match the materials to ensure that they are making creative decisions.      photos from The Creativity Project This collage invitation is from the Creativity Project and has been done many, many times in my classroom. To save teacher time, I asked our local plastic shop (who have a laser cutter) to cut out my design in quantities of 40....

I'm going to be doing some workshops over the next few months and one of them will be Playful Learning. As I reflect upon my math program and gather resources for my new group of learners, I thought you might be interested in what playful math activities to offer children as an alternative to worksheets and graphic organizers. We use loose parts throughout our classroom and nature loose parts in our forest program. These flexible math play activities are popular, easy set ups and can be added to your math play trays. While the children have been enjoying lots of fun fall connected play such as pumpkins, leaves and stick, our math focus has been on building stamina, community and counting skills such as conservation, dot number recognition... playing math games. TEN STICKS This partner dice game using a die and ten sticks is from Messy Maths by Juliet Robertson. Many of our favourite outdoor math games have come from her book. We usually play this game in the forest with sticks or s...

Family Inquiry Like many of you I am working with children and family to create a community in our classroom. I use a few tried and true strategies to accomplish this important goal. These strategies all contribute to our classroom community and includes Inquiry Work. Structured Talk Peppered throughout the day I intentionally plan structured talks. These conversations help children learn to think more deeply, listen to each other and encourage conversation. These include: Think Pair Share, Turn and Talk, Interactive Read Alouds, Conversation Circles (eliminate raised hands). Related skills that can develop through structured talks  are opportunities for students to develop strong communication habits and include: Active listening Empathy and understanding Respecting personal boundaries Nonverbal communication Conflict resolution Play I invest a lot of time for free exploration and playful learning. The emphasis is on the process and providing generous amounts of time for thinking, set...