Back to School

"Can I roll down the hill?"

"Sure!"

"Can I do it again?"

"Absolutely."

We're back at school, and it's wonderful to see everyone actively engaging with the world around us. We were rolling, building, reading, drawing, painting, writing, measuring, pretending, singing, and generally settling into a new year. And all of that happened in just the first two days. This part of the year is all about establishing routines. For our youngest kids that includes how we line up, how we sit and listen to a story, how we share materials, and how we let people know about our feelings. Luckily our older students are great mentors for these skills. For our older students, they are working on solving problems, creating a daily writing practice, figuring out our math routines, and learning/remembering where all our materials go.

Our First Theme: Community

We start every September with a theme focusing on some part of community. This year we are building our own little town and figuring out what a town needs to function. Every child will be making a "peep," a tiny clothespin person who will take on a role (or a few roles) in the life of the town. It's a great way for us to learn about everything from ways to make decisions to the jobs that make a town work well.

We're going to be doing things and doing them again. It's how we learn and how we master skills - even rolling down the hill.