Teacher Tom

I've written here both  recently and in the past about how the application of the business model to education is at best useless, and ...

I can’t remember where I learned our Shapey project, but it’s been a fixture in our Pre-K curriculum for as long as I’ve been teaching. A...

“. . . the arc of moral history is long, but it bends toward justice.” – MLK Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is different in our...

“ Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active out...

Last night our parent community heard from sex educator Amy Lang , who spoke on the topic of how to talk to children about sex. This is an...

Each year on the first Tuesday of the New Year I challenge my Pre-K class to come up with a project that they can do for the “whole scho...

One of our favorite activities at Woodland Park involves children telling stories that I transcribe by hand, then read aloud at circle time....

When my daughter Josephine was born, we were living on the 24 th floor of a condo in the heart of downtown Seattle, only a block from the f...

There is never a shortage of mud in Seattle and the Dennis the Menace style cliché of kids playing with the stuff doesn’t seem to cause eve...

In addition to being a preschool teacher, I’m also an artist, examples of which I’ve shared with you here  and here . The holiday seaso...

I'm a belly on the floor, face full of spittle, "C'mon everybody!"  type of teacher. I wear holes in the knees of all my ...

I awoke yesterday morning to a steady, drizzly rain, the kind of precipitation for which the Pacfic Northwest is known. I’m a veteran of “we...

The children do quite a bit of storytelling  at Woodland Park, much of which I post here for your entertainment and edification. (If you’re ...

( Note: This is the third and final of my series of posts on academic testing, and specifically the high stakes standardized testing that...