It’s Raining

Exactly 1 week after we made and posted our "Visualize Rain" sign, it rained. We celebrated with popcorn and invited the Kindergarten to share with us.

Outside vs. Inside the Box

The boys' creativity has exploded lately.  We experimented with centripetal force as we continue to discover space..  They took a fairly simple experiment with paper plates and a marble and built it up three stories!!  Then they spent their whole recess working on it together. Meanwhile, in Tim's inventing class, they practiced thinking outside the …

Solar System in the Feeling Years

"The second stage of growth in Education for Life covers the ages from 6-12, the “Feeling” or elementary years. Here we find a very special window of opportunity when children are most able to learn about and through their feelings." We are nearing the end of about a month unit of making Solar System cards …

Being Happy Brings Good Luck

Yesterday one of my students was having trouble getting out from a mood and to anything anyone said, he would complain with loud negations.  His mood had carried over from recess when no one wanted to play his game.  He had sulked around the play area and was not open to talking about it.  He …

Intuitive Teaching = “Are we learning or having fun?”

"Wait... we didn't DO school yesterday... or did we?"  That's what I heard two boys discussing today.  I realized that they were trying to determine if what we did was school work because it seemed like they were just having a fun day. We often "play" math.  Learning multiplication tables with our version of "Go …

Aum. Everything’s So Beautiful, Now!

We talk about awareness a lot in our class; awareness of other people's realities besides our own; awareness of our space when it collides with someone else's; awareness of how our voices sound and what messages that sends to others, to name a few.  We even have a little hand motion we do with sound …