Nursery Blog

Classroom Blogs

A Roly-poly and Lost Puppies: A Look at Emergent Curriculum

By Celia Cruz

“Follow the child’s interests in people, objects, places, and activities, and talk with them. It’s social interaction that creates a link between the child and an ongoing activity. Help them learn how to articulate themselves and participate in the world.” Anne Haas Dyson Our nursery learners make a variety of choices during morning inside-outside play. Over the past few weeks, we’ve observed a flurry of planning and collaboration among the children while they performed a Wedding Ballet, constructed a house for puppies on the loose,  made a temporary habitat for caterpillars beneath the walnut tree, and designed Magna-tile palaces for cats. Their emerging interests … READ MORE »

Math All Around

By Marisa Campbell

Young children are, by nature, curious about math. When children practice the foundational skills, such as number sense, geometry, measurement and spatial relations in a hands-on approach, it allows them to make meaningful connections with math in an authentic way. READ MORE »

What Is a Recipe?

By Celia Cruz

We recently asked our nursery learners to help us answer the following question: What is a recipe? Immediately someone exclaimed, “Steps!” Young children enjoy describing how something is achieved through a series of actions or steps.  When our nursery learners engage in dramatic play involving mud kitchens, palaces, and camping, contribute to group meetings to share ideas about conflict resolution, collaborate to add to circle songs and movement games, and work together on things such as kneading dough to printmaking, they also begin to make meaning of dialogue based on recipes, step-by-step instructions, lists, and other examples of procedural text. Outside in the mud kitchen, … READ MORE »