A Beautiful Gathering

It may have been a short week, but it was one filled with such sweetness and connection. Our hearts are especially full as we reflect on our Child-Led Choice Time Share and the joy of welcoming so many grownups into our classroom community.

There was something truly special about watching our morning and full-day friends invite their loved ones into the spaces, materials, and moments that make up their days at school. To see children proudly lead the way—to offer a seat at the sensory table, introduce a favorite area, or simply share in play—was such a beautiful reminder of how meaningful it is to experience learning through their eyes.

We also had the joy of celebrating Renata’s birthday together, adding an extra bit of sweetness to our short week.

Thank you to everyone who joined us. Your presence helped make the morning feel extra special, and we loved sharing a little piece of our school world with you.

Please enjoy a few lovely photos from our time together, and we wish everyone a beautiful and restful weekend!

Cinnamon the Bunny and Daphne and the Dragon

We had several very special visitors at Brooklyn Schoolhouse this week… both real and imaginary! During Theater Adventures, your children received a letter from Daphne the Dragon: she injured her claw, and asked us to travel (via our Magical Elevator) to Dragon Land to help heal her. Everyone had wonderful and creative ideas about how to help Daphne’s claw feel better, including giving it an X-Ray, wrapping it in a cast, putting medicine on it, and giving her some Chocolate afterwards. We also played an exciting game of “Statue Garden” while in Dragon Land where children turned into all sorts of silly statues, including trolls and tigers!

Our real life animal visitor this week was Cinnamon the Bunny! We spent all week preparing for this visit, and talked about some of the ways that we can make a bunny feel safe at Brooklyn Schoolhouse: using small voices, calm bodies, and a one finger touch when petting the bunny’s ears. We practiced these skills with animals puppets first so that we felt very prepared when a living creature arrived. Your children also brainstormed questions about bunnies to ask Cinnamon’s caretaker, Rachel. These questions included “Do bunnies like eggs?” “Does Cinnamon have bunny friends?” and “What are bunnies allergic to?” Thank you Cinnamon and Rachel for coming to visit us at school this week!

Our class story this week was “Library Lion” by Michelle Knudsen. This heart-warming story reminds children and grown-ups alike that sometimes it is okay to break rules, especially if you have a good reason to do so. This story sparked many rich conversations about it means to break rules, and when we should make new ones at school.

Other highlights from this week include celebrating Max’s birthday, painting rocks outside in the yard, and melting and refreezing “magical ice cubes” in our sensory table! We hope you have some lovely “home days,” and we’ll see you next week!

Making a Snack Menu

We’ve created a new tool for the classroom: A Snack Menu!

Kids helped Zoe make a menu for snack time to show everyone what kinds of food are being served and the hand signals we can use to ask for them: hand on head for fruit, finger on nose for crunchy snack. First, kids made a practice drawing on a blank piece of paper. Then, when they liked their plan and felt confident, they made a final drawing on paper from a Restaurant Guest Check Pad and labeled it. It was exciting to see kids helping and offering each other ideas on how to draw their pictures. Cleo took inspiration from Emilia, who drew many clementines on her paper, rather than just one. Eva tried many different ways to draw a pretzel before figuring out she could start with the shape of a heart and add lines to make it look more like how she pictured it. Later, she instructed Eli how he could do the same when he was asking how to draw a pretzel. Manu used stamps to label the “fruit” side of our chart.

Our puppets, Bill the Owl, Turtle, and Horsie, have made a few appearances at Morning Meeting this week. The fuzzy friends have been disagreeing about things like the weather and how they want to play at school. All the puppets have different ideas from one another, and each thinks their idea is the only right one, and they’re all so frustrated! The kids have been trying to help the puppets come up with ideas for what we do when we’re frustrated and disagree with a friend. One thing they’ve come up with so far is to get a teacher or grown-up to help!

Outside, we’ve been exploring eucalyptus plants leftover from our Earth Day Celebration! Ripping leaves from the stems and using them as ingredients for salads and soups being made in the play kitchen. Other kids used the entire stem itself as brushes, some as brooms, and even as ropes to help pull kids out of pretend lava.

Ju-milia took the kids in small groups out to the garden and observed what’s growing. Using clipboards and crayons, kids drew pictures of what is in bloom!

This Pretty Planet

This week, we continued our discussions about Earth Day and helped prepare for our upcoming Saturday Earth Day Fundraiser. Children rehearsed “This Pretty Planet” with Tony, which children and families will get to sing together at tomorrow’s celebration! We played with Earth-inspired green and blue play dough, used recycled paper to create decorative paper chains, used stamps to spell out words that described the rocks in our yard (like “bumpy” and “gray”), used a few bouncy balls to visualize how the earth moves around the sun at meeting, and used soap and water to scrub the labels off old plastic jars to reuse as classroom materials.

We practiced writing the “i” sound, and examined its uppercase and lowercase forms. We focused on the word “insect” as a word that begins with “i” and ties into our Earth Day curriculum. Many books we read this week are about insects. We loved “A Good Place” by Lucy Cousins and “Roberto: The Insect Architect” by Nina Laden!

We continued to put on puppet shows in the loft, build with wooden blocks and leaves, and enjoy the outdoor weather! In theater adventures, we met a bunny named Buster.

We got to celebrate Eva’s fourth birthday on Friday! We loved getting to hear her grownups read us a Molly of Denali story and eating cupcakes all together.

We look forward to seeing many of you for our Earth Day Fundraiser tomorrow, Saturday April 25, from 10-1 at Brooklyn Schoolhouse!

The World and Everything In It

This week, as we prepare to celebrate Earth Day, we read “The World and Everything In It” by Kevin Henkes. This book talks about what is in the world - the big, small and medium things - and invites us to notice the natural objects around us. We talked about caring for the earth by picking up trash and sorting waste into the compost and recycling. We observed three rocks from our rock garden using our senses of sight and touch, and wrote down their qualities. We also thought of things in our lives that matter to us and sorted them into the categories of small, medium and big.

We continued to play outdoors and indoors, enjoying the warm weather! We took care of our bodies by taking frequent water bottle breaks and practicing applying sunscreen using a mirror outdoors. Friends observed the spring flowers in the garden, practiced hanging clothes from a clothesline, and piled rocks into hollowed-out sponges, calling them “sacks of potatoes.”

We continued to work on making portraits of the classroom puppets, focusing this week on drawing our owl puppet, Bill. They noticed that he has spots on his body and debated whether polka dots are a kind of pattern. They drew belly buttons for him, which they called “Bill-y buttons.”

We ended our week by getting to celebrate Theo’s and Graham’s 4th birthdays during a double-birthday read-aloud! Theo’s and Graham’s families came in to share treats and read stories. We loved celebrating all together as a community.

We look forward to seeing many of you at our Earth Day celebration on Saturday, April 25! Have a fantastic weekend, everyone.

From Huffs and Puffs to Giggles and Grins

Even with a short week, we packed in so much joy both inside and outside the classroom. This week, we revisited The Three Little Pigs, and the story quickly became a shared experience. Children eagerly joined in during the more dramatic moments, adding their own “uh oh!” and “oh no!” as the wolf huffed and puffed. It’s been so sweet to see how familiar stories become even more meaningful when we tell them together.

As we get ready for Picture Day this Monday, we’ve been practicing what it feels like to have our photo taken. Using Polaroid cameras, children spent time in the loft taking pictures of one another, trying out silly faces, saying “cheese,” and even holding a favorite stuffy when they wanted a little extra comfort. These moments connect to the portrait work we’ve been exploring in the classroom, where children are beginning to notice their own features and the features of their friends—seeing themselves and each other with curiosity and care.

We also brought out our soft climbing blocks and mats, giving our bodies lots of space to move and play. At one point, the room filled with “worms” as children wiggled and stretched their way across the mats, laughing and moving together.

We look forward to seeing everyone on Monday for Picture Day!

Beanbags and Puppets

This week, we have been practicing using beanbags at our meeting times to count, balance, and cooperate with one another! We sang “pass the beanbag all around!” and took turns handing each other the beanbag as we sat in a circle. We also tried carrying the beanbag between our knees and dropping it in the middle of the circle, balancing the beanbag on our knee while standing on one leg, and passing each other the beanbag in silly ways (like with our elbow or our foot). These activities all strengthened our gross motor, executive function and counting skills. The beanbags were lovingly made by Zoe!

On Monday, Manu’s mom Nadia came in to share a story about Eid al-Fitr. We celebrated by constructing and hanging decorative lanterns, putting on temporary tattoos, and getting henna drawn on our hands by Nadia. Thank you, Nadia and Manu! Eid Mubarak to all who celebrated.

We deepened our puppet study this week by interviewing several beloved classroom puppets: Horsie, Turtle, and Bill the Owl. We drafted questions for the puppets, like “What do you like to eat?” and “What helps you feel comfortable?” We practiced drawing puppets, from both a “bird’s eye view” and a “ladybug’s eye view” (a bottom-up view). We also reviewed what puppets are, and what we know about each of our puppets. Eva said that a puppet is “something you can move and make talk with your voice.” Eli asked, “How does Turtle even put his head inside his shell?”

Finally, we played with new materials in our classroom, including props in the loft that helped us act out a Goldilocks-inspired story, a water table with purple food coloring, and big cardboard tubes in the block area. In theater adventures, we got to meet an Axlotl and create choreography to “Under the Sea” from the Little Mermaid!

Have a wonderful spring break! We look forward to seeing you when we are all back on April 7.

Photos From Our Week

Here are photos from this week and last week, including those from Luca’s birthday celebration last Thursday!

Sunshine, Show Time, and Counting to Big Numbers ☀️

From noticing the changing weather, to counting our way to big numbers, to bringing puppet shows to life, we continued to explore the world around them with enthusiasm and care. We began our week with the gift of wonderfully warm weather. Our story this week, The Rain Came Down by David Shannon, felt like the perfect companion to these shifting skies. Just like the story, we noticed how changes in the weather help us wonder about what might happen next. Is the sky getting darker? Will it rain later? These small observations sparked conversations and predictions, reminding us how closely children watch the world around them.

We also spent time this week counting in playful and meaningful ways. We worked together to count and place our collection of can tabs into jars, and watched the numbers grow bigger and bigger. We counted to 30, 100, then 200, and even 300. Each milestone brought a wave of excitement as the children realized just how many tabs we have collected together so far this year.

Our classroom puppet theater also became a lively place of imagination and collaboration this week. We spent time diving deeper into what makes a puppet show come to life. Diving into the role of the audience, quickly reminding one another of important theater rules with calls of “No talking!” and “Phones off!” Some children took on the role of servers, offering popcorn and ice cream sandwiches to the audience before the show began. Behind the scenes, actors carefully prepared with finger puppets and silk scarves as costumes. We even talked about what an intermission is—a special pause in the show when actors can switch costumes and the audience can stretch, enjoy snacks, and talk about the performance they just watched.

Please enjoy some lovely photos from our week, and have a wonderful weekend!

Do You See Something Yellow Somewhere In This Classroom?

Kids have been practicing sorting and organizing this week through scavenger hunts at morning meeting. Every day, 3 different groups took turns finding types of materials around the classroom to bring back to the rug and sort. Monday, kids sorted things by color; Tuesday, kids sorted things into big and small; Wednesday, kids found things in between big and small; Thursday, kids sorted things into pairs; Friday, kids sorted things by material. It was so fun to work together and move around the classroom, finding creative solutions to our challenge.

This week was also the first week we used our class job chart! All the kids have important jobs they do every day, like unpacking our bags, keeping ourselves and our friends safe, and playing. Each week, different kids get the chance to do class jobs, like collecting dots, setting up snacks, and bringing our weekly story to and from the self. Kids practice their job every day for that week before someone new gets a turn the next week. Thank you to our classroom helpers who did a great job this week taking care of and preparing the classroom for all the kids!

Outside, we watched as piles of snow slowly shrank and melted before turning into puddles perfect for splashing in! We’re all starting to get excited for Spring, even and especially if that means more rain!

Inside, friends up in the loft called for everyone below to watch their puppet show. Kids set up chairs for the audience while performers in the loft negotiated and planned their performance, and chefs in the play kitchen prepared ice cream sandwiches as in-viewing snacks. Using finger puppets, we heard stories of octopuses that live to 100 years old and dogs with brothers.

Friends also explored some new-shaped blocks and loose parts in the block area. It was fun to envelop animals inside cardboard tubes or connect them to blocks with rubber bands. Fake ivy turned into jungles and gardens outside dramatic cities and castles.

The kids who stay for lunch started a new podcast: PBS Molly of Denali. The story follows Molly, a girl whose family is native to Alaska, and the mystery of how her birthday cake disappeared. The story features a mischievous raven character, which we learned, through research, is a recurring symbol in Native Alaskan culture. Ravens can either be tricksters or protectors in stories, and sometimes even both. We even looked back at a book we read in the beginning of the year to learn about other symbols in native culture.

Celebrations, Snowy Days, and An Experiment

It’s been wonderful to be back at school with the children this week! We’ve been exploring the snow in our yard, uncovering “buried treasure” with shovels and sifters. We’ve been cooking up soup in our play kitchen, exploring new materials in the sensory table and using stamps to write notes for each other.

Nona’s family came in to celebrate her fifth birthday on Thursday! We had fun learning about sea creatures from her animal encyclopedia. Happy birthday, Nona!

While reading Buffalo Fluffalo by Bess Kalb and Erin Kroan, we did an experiment! In the story, the buffalo gets wet and becomes much smaller. We poured water over crumped-up tissues and observed what happened when they got wet. The tissues shrunk and the children described what happened. “It’s wet,” said Charlie. “It’s heavy when there’s water,” said Luca. Renata said, “You see this rain cloud? It got squeezed. A cloud is made of water. The water makes the buffalo puffy and smaller.”

The week before our February break, we celebrated Valentine’s Day by working on Valentines for each other and our families. Children put Valentines in each others’ mailboxes and hung decorated hearts in our school’s front window. Rose’s mom came in to read a Valentine’s Day story with us and decorate cookies!

Finally, in theater adventures this week, we took turns twirling like snowflakes on the wind. Then we had to sneak past some winter creatures to rescue an egg and bring it back to its penguin parent! We were successful.

Have a wonderful weekend and we look forward to seeing you all next week!

Small, Medium, and Big Problems

The massive snowstorm from the weekend created some truly awesome fun for us this week. While some kids opted to stay warm inside, others layered on their winter gear to go play in the snow. Upon seeing the mountains of snow and icicles around the yard, kids deemed the area a “Winter Wonderland.“ There was so much snow that the milk crates were stuck and needed 3 kids working together just to pull one out! It was really fun to discover and collect chunks of ice around the yard; kids called them “ice crystals” and protected them from giant snow monsters. We also experimented with spray paint, or colored water in spray bottles, to decorate our yard rainbow colors.

Inside, dramatic puppet shows were performed from the top off the loft. Down below on the big green rug, kids lined up stools and chairs to create an audience, or a viewing area to watch the puppet shows. Kids discussed how they wanted each other to behave during the shows, coming up with rules like:

-No talking

-No pictures

-No food or drink

-No glass

Meeting, this week, was an interesting conversation about problems. We talked about different types of problems and how they can be solved. Small problems are things that kids can try and solve by themselves first, like zipping up a jacket. A medium problem is something where a kid needs a grownup’s help, like a book page getting ripped. A big problem is something where a grownup needs to call another grownup for help, like when the plumber came to fix the school toilet last week. Being able to label our problems has been helpful for kids to work through their feelings and know how to solve issues.

It’s hard to believe we’re in for more snow this weekend, but we’re excited for all the fun it’ll bring us next week! Stay warm!

Portraits, Feelings, and Straight/Curvy Lines

This week, we’ve been playing boisterously in the loft, in the snow, and with building materials around the room. We particularly enjoyed finding “ice crystals” in the sinks in the yard, practicing cutting with scissors and paper at the art table, and sending letters to each other at the classroom’s message center.

We’ve been working on concepts around literacy and body awareness that share something in common: straight and curvy lines. We’ve been using Handwriting Without Tears’ “Mat Man” curriculum to create the human body out of straight and curvy lines, and then using those lines to create upper and lower-case letters during small group work. We’ve been working on self-portraits, noticing the straight and curvy lines in our own faces and translating what we see in the mirror to a representation on paper.

We have continued to explore how we’re feeling by naming feelings such as “calm,” “sad,” “happy,” “angry” and “love.” Each morning, children move their pictures to one of the “feelings collages” we made in small groups, in order to share with the class how they’re feeling that day. If a child’s feelings change over the course of the day, we encourage them to change their picture to match how they are feeling - which can serve as a way to help name, sit with and resolve the feeling.

We are wishing everyone a cozy, snowy weekend!

Photos From Our Week

Photos from Cora’s birthday celebration last week, as well as the beginning of this week!

Exploring Feelings, Letters, and Community

This week has been filled with connection, creativity, and meaningful moments together. It was especially lovely to welcome families into our community for our very first all-school sing of 2026. Seeing familiar faces gathered together to share music set such a joyful tone for the days ahead.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve also been discussing our loft space, which officially opened this week. The children were thrilled to explore it, and it has already become a favorite spot for imaginative play—especially puppet shows, where stories and friendships flourish.

In small group work, we focused on early literacy skills by practicing curves and lines, with special attention to the letter “M.” The children approached this work with care and concentration, building confidence as they explored letter shapes.

Our book this week, The Color Monster, opened up thoughtful conversations about feelings. Together, we explored what happiness, anger, fear, sadness, calm, and love can look and feel like. The children expressed these emotions through beautiful feelings collages, which are now displayed in our classroom as a reflection of their ideas.

We hope everyone enjoys a restful holiday weekend. See you all on Tuesday!

Photos From Our Week

Welcome Back!

Happy New Year! It’s been an absolute joy reuniting with friends and teachers back at Brooklyn Schoolhouse after a long Winter Break. Kids have been updating each other on trips they took, gifts they got, and people they saw. They’ve also been exploring new changes to the classroom together. Some areas in the classroom have moved, some have new materials, and some are completely new altogether.

One of the new areas at school is the Message Center. Here, kids can explore writing, reading, and drawing messages. This week, we used the Message Center to learn pre-literacy skills like tracing and coloring in to create a “Jack-O-Lantern face”. Friends felt so proud when they finished their drawings. Some kids even added details, like teeth and eyebrows, to the face they made.

The acorns, seed pods, and pinecones families collected were added to the corn sensory table. Throughout the week, acorns were cracking and kids were fascinated by their insides. They started having more questions about the insides of other things they saw in the table. Teachers helped open a Sycamore Ball which revealed a fluffy and almost feathery inside.

At Meeting, we’ve started preparing for a long awaited change to classroom: opening up the loft! Friends helped each other come up with rules to use the loft safely. Ideas like, eyes facing forward, slow feet, and keep space between friends. We also brainstormed some materials and toys to put up in the loft, things like decorations, stuffies, “Love Every” boxes, and toy animals.

We’re excited to open the loft soon and see what fun we can get up to in there!

Celebrating Snow and Winter Holidays

This week at school, children helped make paper chains to decorate our classroom for our schoolwide Winter Celebration! Zoe led children in cutting out strips of recycled paper and weaving them together.

Families came in to visit and share their winter holiday traditions. Nona’s parents, Nadia and Robbie, and Eli and Athena’s parents, Justine and Daniel, visited and shared about Hanukkah! We got to hear two Hanukkah stories, light a Lego menorah together, and eat sufganiyot together.

Throughout the week, children enjoyed the snow in our yard! We explored the textures of snow and observed how ice and snow melt into water. Zoe shared with us about Ukrainian Christmas, and we made cherry turnovers inspired by Ukrainian verenyky to celebrate. We served these turnovers at our winter celebration!

We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and we are looking forward to seeing you all in the New Year!

Lights, Recipes, and Cozy Winter Play ✨

Our week was filled with creativity, exploration, and the kind of cozy winter play that brings everyone together.

We began our week by making lime-green play-dough, working with friends to explore something new: a recipe. The children noticed how each ingredient had a purpose, and Renata offered a wonderful observation as she helped mix:

“A recipe is like a menu.”

Her words sparked a conversation about how recipes guide us just like menus help us choose what we want.

We also spent time talking about lights, noticing how they appear all around us during this season. We wondered together about how lights help us see, how they make spaces feel special, and how they’re used in different celebrations this time of year. We talked about the menorah, Christmas tree lights, and the kinara, and the children shared their own experiences with decorations at home. Inspired by these conversations, we used our ideas to decorate our classroom loft with lights, making it feel cozy, welcoming, and festive.

With the colder weather creeping in, we used some of our indoor time to stay warm and play a favorite community-building game: “Who’s Under the Blanket?” The room filled with giggles as friends guessed who was hiding and took turns being the mystery person.

Out in the yard, our time together was—as always—full of exploration, movement, and imaginative ideas. The children continue to show curiosity in every corner of our outdoor space, creating stories, challenges, and discoveries in the crisp air.

We ended our week with a very special visit: Luca’s mom, Martha, came in to read Nanette’s Baguette. The children were delighted by the silly rhymes and playful illustrations—and even more excited when she surprised us with real baguettes to share during snack time. It was a warm and joyful treat that brought our classroom together.

Have a beautiful, cozy weekend, and see you next week!

Photos From Our Week