Here’s a question for you: What is a number?

We’ve been exploring this question in class using the tree branch that stands in front of our window. Until early this week, it was a “kindness tree,” with paper leaves carrying all sorts of lovely stories of kindness in and out of the classroom. This week, I took down all of our kindness leaves to make space for something new — number leaves.

One of the interesting things about working with young children is that every now and then, they will choose to drop what they have learned and experiment with their old ways. Over the last couple of weeks, the whole class wordlessly decided to do this with sharing materials and cooperating in play. Our class went from being a relatively harmonious place to a room full of sectioned-off spaces where some children were permitted and others were not. As you can imagine, this is pretty frustrating as a teacher and not much fun as a student.

Last Friday we had a visit from Rachel Zollinger, an art education specialist. She came to our class to work with our students on observational art. While we typically think of observational art as relying on sight and focusing on realistic depiction, Rachel encouraged us to use our sense of touch – we worked to draw what we felt instead of what we saw.