Curriculum
At Brooklyn Schoolhouse we believe in child-led and project-based learning. In this style of learning, our curriculum each year emerges from the children’s interests and questions. Teachers listen closely and carefully to children, and respond to their interests by providing classroom possibilities for the area of inquiry to develop over time. Some curricula examples have included Storytelling, Insects, Puppets and Mobile-Making.
The Mobile Project
Teachers observed children’s interest in beading activities, and saw that children treasured necklaces and bracelets they had beaded at home and at birthday parties.
To follow this interest, teachers set up a space to paint wooden beads using colors the children had mixed themselves. We made jars and jars of them!
Children began sorting and choosing beads to string together, and teachers collected the questions that arose – what is a bead? Can we make them? Buy them? Find them?
The class decided to use our beads for a mobile project. We looked at examples of mobiles and wondered what ours could look like.
Teachers gathered found-objects and other materials for children to experiment with – yogurt-pouch caps, preserved fruit, can tabs, old key rings. It seemed like a bead could be almost anything, as long as there was a hole to string through it!
Children experimented with clay to create beads. They made squiggly, round, and flat beads.
More explorations flourished from here.
Children searched their homes for items that they wished to turn into a bead and add to the mobile.
Teachers drilled small holes to make the objects bead-able. Bells, small plastic dinosaurs, plastic spoons and even small artwords became part of the beading activity.
Parents, siblings, and caregivers spent a morning in the classroom to finish beading and connecting all the strands.
This work culminated in stringing the painted, found, invented and sculpted beads into several mobiles. What were once separate and unique parts were joined together into an artwork for the whole community to enjoy.
Curriculum that is open-ended surprises and inspires us all.
Through an emergent curriculum, children experience their ideas as meaningful contributions that are explored by their friends and teachers, and integrated into the school day.
