Last week, I wrote about the magic of referring to students as mathematicians, scientists, writers, readers, and more.  However, I do not merely call our sweet little ones all of these things.  I treat them as these things too.  In my mind, they are...

One of the main goals of kindergarten literacy, other than the foundational pieces for encoding and decoding, is to help our littlest learners fall in love with literacy, with reading other people's stories and telling their own as well as reading to learn and writing...

Word scientists.  Mathematicians.  Writers.  Readers.  Inventors.  Explorers.  Stop motion movie makers.  I refer to our little ones as all of these things throughout the day, and it works a little magic.  Suddenly, our...

As part of Writing Workshop, we will routinely "publish" books.  Our writers' first experience with this was Friday.  Currently, our little one's writing is very much an approximation of writing.  My main goal at this point is for them to write for extended periods of...

The primary work we are doing right now is building our classroom community.  Although we do this work all day long (and will continue to do it all year long), it is our main focus during Inquiry Workshop, where we actively study and investigate, "How can we make the...

Kindergarten is a year of tremendous growth and your little one will blossom as a reader, writer, mathematician, scientist, explorer, engineer, friend, learner, and citizen of the world.  At PNA, we teach using the workshop style to engage students in authentic...

The early reading years are critical to reading success.  Study after study has shown literacy researchers that the more time children spend reading, the more skilled they become at reading.  The opposite is true as well.  The less children read, the more they...

As an educator, I want my students to take ownership of and responsibility for their learning.  At PNA, we encourage this throughout the year by giving students choice within limits and structure.  Each day, students choose which books to read at their just-right...

This week was full of castle dreams.  Our sweet little ones have been excited to build and sleep in the castle since the beginning of school.  Throughout the year, I have been asked almost weekly about when we would be building the castle and having our sleepover. ...

One of my favorite things about project based learning is the way it teaches our students that they can make a difference in the world and help solve its problems, now.  When we first started studying animals and endangered animals, one of our sweet little ones said,...