Sylvia Street Playschool
350 Sylvia Street V8V 1C6 Victoria, BC, Canada

"Look, we made roots." Curiosity, experimentation and observation, a recipe for learning that is made especially meaningful when you can share it with a colleague.

The tides have been low and the tide-pooling fascinating. We've seen baby sea stars, baby sea urchins, egg noodle eggs, and whole cities of isopods and crabs.

The stickiest batch ever, it took a while to get comfortable with it...

Wave jumping, time it to land as the wave crests or wait till it flattens, no matter how you go about it it's so satisfying.

If you have young children please read this and take it to heart. Our kids need us to believe in them and allow them to struggle, that’s how they’ll grow up resilient. You can’t teach resilience, you can only provide an environment that allows them to build it through their own efforts.

We made a purple cabbage extraction and experimented by adding citric acid & baking soda. It turned pink when we added citric acid, and blue when we added baking soda. But the pièce de résistance of the experiment was when we added baking soda TO THE PINK SOLUTION. M called it chemical power!

The language we use is powerful.

"What kids need...is for their feelings to be understood and respected, not questioned.!" YES!!!

Play and Learning as Equal Partners

This is a great list of kids books; so many of our all time faves.

International Dog Day 2020 - Rosie is on the premises!

It is with heavy hearts that we announce Sir Ken Robinson died peacefully yesterday, 21st August 2020, surrounded by family after a short battle with cancer. We will be following up with a further update as we begin to follow Sir Kens wishes and honour his legacy.

An Ecological Education, just think how wonderful it would be if all children grew up understanding in their bones what the natural world means for our worlds well being.

I think they might ALL be in the sandbox here. Theres something about this clip that makes my heart sing. 8 kids in a 12x14 sandbox, all doing their own thing yet working together. Thats play, freely chosen, self directed with some community rules made explicit by the space; no one is getting in anyones way, they are all working with and around one another.

Drawing and being inspired by one another. I wonder if the amaryllis with its long straight stalk had anything to do with these?

Can you see the cogs turning? Click, click. click. This is what rich learning looks like: the kids are deeply engaged, theyre driven by curiosity, and its self-directed. Who knows where what they learned that day took them? It doesnt really matter, all just part of making connections...

Can you feel it?!! Joy, pure joy. I want children to feel joy every day.

"Have a person ever got eaten by a shark? Out of the blue...or was he thinking about his friends? Is that why he wasnt in the water with them? We talked about sharks, he told me more, he was curious. "Sharks are fish arent they? So how come they eat fish?" Hes thinking deeply about the world around him, kids do. So important that they be given the space to persue their interests, to discover for themselves what they value.

She found a rock at the beach and was inspired... a selfie, with her very own stone phone.

I asked the kids if they thought birds had feelings. Well ya Sarah of course they do, theyre birds. Duhhh?!!!

Im missing them....

Oh how wonderful to hear this being said over and over. Rich open-ended experiences, thats what children need most.

The kids have been working with mud for a while now: theyve created mud rivers, mud slides, mud dams and now are onto mud balls (also known as dorodangos). They discovered this on their own, mud is a universal medium for children. Dorodango (Japanese: , lit. "mud dumpling") is a Japanese art form in which earth and water are molded to create a delicate shiny sphere, resembling a billiard ball.

A colour palette influences what is painted. The colours are mixed and the inspiration is taken: The Sun is Going Up, the Sun is Going Up With Clouds, Rain, Snow, A Leaf is Going Down, Flowers Going Down. The thinking unfolds and is made visible.

I hadnt thought about undirected freely chosen play as having rules, but of course it does. I watched it unfold today when the kids were playing with squirt bottles and one of them said, "Hey, you sprayed me in the eye. You cant spray in the eye, thats why you hold the spray bottle down low." The kids all gathered round and discussed it thoroughly, end result, no spraying in the eye, its obvious. "Play is freely chosen activity, but it is not freeform activity. Play always has structure, and that structure derives from rules in the players mind."

Mixing paints becomes an inspiration for painting pictures. Creative exploration that just flows from one thing to another, so satisfying.

We all think shes adorable. 14, a little bit daft, and ADORABLE!!!

So when Jim added 3 yards of sand to the sandbox, the level went up and suddenly made the plum tree accessible. Plums, tons of plums on the tree this year, I allowed as how it would be OK to pick that one branch of unripe plums. They gathered half a bucket full: they rolled them down planks, they floated them down rivers, they crushed them with rocks and made paste to serve to each other. AND THEN, they remembered the vice on the work bench. Well the result, plum juice made with enthusiasm using a non-food grade juicer. After two days of research they are still working on perfecting the recipe. I think sacrificing a branch full of prune plums was worth it.

Nothing like an oyster mushroom kit to bring "Mushrooms in the Rain" to life.

A slippery rock slide, from a day at the beach last October.

The things you find at the beach can only be out done by the things you can do with the things you find at the beach.

Give a couple of kids spray bottles full of food colouring and a few boxes of cornstarch, theyll know just what to do...

Looking forward to sharing this with the kids. Weve just started feeding hummingbirds in our bee garden and weve learned some remarkable things about them. Did you know that hummingbirds cant walk? They can stand, but not walk.

3 yards of new sand, thanks Jimmy!!!

"Setting limits without punishments works. In fact, it works so beautifully that youll find you need to set fewer and fewer limits, especially once the toddler years have passed."

First you gather the wood, then you chuck all of it over the edge, and then you watch it drift out to sea. Then you go get another load, and repeat. By the time we left there was a trail as far as the eye could see.