The Remake

Fifty-five children, fifteen teachers, and seventy family members (parents, grandparents, and younger siblings)–the bulk of the Newtowne Community–are at a local park for our end of year All School Field Trip.

When a child sits down with a pile of bricks, they enter into a conversation with what they are making.

I think a lot about climate change and what it means for my students at Newtowne School.

There are a host of questions artificial intelligence raises about education.

Grounded in a 20 minute episode on the playground, this essay shares the perspectives of colleagues and children to explore four teacher decision points regarding the socialization of children’s relationship with the natural world.

Every time I talk to Susan MacKay and Matt Karlsen from the Studio for Playful Inquiry I learn something.

The Studio for Playful Inquiry is a vibrant, international community of educators who think deeply about the role of playful learning in our turbulent times.

This essay describes the start of the Special Critter Friends project which aspires to foster four and five-year-olds' solidarity with nature by creating a bond between children and particular animals.

In January my former student Zolan Kanno-Youngs was in the news.

Evolution doesn’t design — it repurposes.

Ben Mardell and Amos Blanton In our most recent essay we explained the urgency of our work, reviewing the science of climate change.

Ben Mardell and Amos Blanton Politically, 2026 has started as a continuation of 2025, only darker.

Lately, leaders in the movement to address climate change have described our current malaise as a crisis of the imagination, by which they mean it seems hard for us to collectively imagine and move towards a better, more sustainable future.

This essay builds on a previous post about collective imagination and The Leaf People.

This essay describes a session where two- and three-year-olds explore a solar powered Merry-Go-Round created from the Playing with the Sun kit, documenting how these materials create opportunities for hypothesizing and experimentation.