#firstdayofN+K
Check out our quick video featuring all of the important moments from the first day of Nursery and Kindergarten!
Nursery Blog
Classroom Blogs
Playing Stories
Inspired by the methods of the brilliant preschool and kindergarten teacher Vivian Gussin Paley, the nursery children have been acting out the stories we wrote for this year’s Miquon Grass literary magazine. Each morning at meeting, a child’s story is selected to be acted out, or played. We read it aloud, talk about what characters need to be in the story, and then the author of the story becomes the director and chooses the actors. While playing the story, the children pay close attention to each other and the director, taking cues from each other, as they do in play, but … READ MORE »
Is elephant blood orange, and other questions…
In any given year in the Miquon Nursery, teachers nurture child-led play and see how it develops. This follows the Reggio Emelia approach of an emergent curriculum–when themes emerge in a consistent way that gain momentum and children’s interest. READ MORE »
Sprinkle Factory
“It is a sugar carrier because these are the sprinkles and it’s carrying them. We put sprinkles into there.” (Pearl) READ MORE »
A Roly-poly and Lost Puppies: A Look at Emergent Curriculum
“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 »
Dancing Dots and Tapping Beats: “I Notice a Pattern!”
Our emergent curriculum leads us far and wide, and the children’s exploration thus far invites us to look at repetition and design of patterns that interconnect within nature, math, sound, movement, and art. READ MORE »
“Pretend we were just born”
A close look inside our Nursery classroom reveals children’s stories unfolding, characters evolving and plots twisting. READ MORE »
Finding Empathy Through Art and Story
During morning choice time, many of our learners are taking agency in talking about what they are creating and their intention to give it to someone as a kind gesture. READ MORE »
Math All Around
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?
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 »
