Curriculum Corner: 'Showing up for Floyd'
The Sapphires are eager to give back, and several recent projects proved to be a sweet and close-to-home way to bring joy to their loved ones.
By Abby Nicolo and Kara Buehler, Blue Mountain School Sapphire teachers (serving Pre-K)
A common theme in the Sapphire class recently has been community participation. From our food drive for Plenty! to other projects we’ve worked on this week, the Sapphires are showing up for Floyd!
Children are not always thought of as contributing citizens, but they are, and activities like these can be a great way to empower even our youngest learners to take ownership of the communities they live in and to grow up understanding what it means to actively participate and practice good citizenship. We are proud of the work we’re doing here at Blue Mountain School and appreciate all of your support.
We spent a beautiful week making memories together through a variety of hands-on holiday projects. This cohort of learners really seem to love all things winter and Christmas, and we leaned into it. We practiced letter recognition and phonemic awareness while making holiday cards for friends and family. The Sapphires are eager to give back, and this was a sweet and close-to-home way to bring joy to their loved ones.
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The Sapphires were also tasked with making ornaments to decorate a tree for WinterFest at The Floyd Center for the Arts to represent Blue Mountain School. As a class, we decided on a space theme for the ornaments to go along with our Space Study. We closely examined pictures of what the planets look like and then matched acrylic colors to paint on clear ornaments.
This made for great discussion: “Is Mars actually red?”, “How can we make rings around Saturn?”, “What is the sun actually made of?”
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We also used our fine motor skills to string beads with colors “that look like the universe” and shaped pipe cleaners into stars. The Sapphires were very proud of their work.
The second part of the week was spent building our gingerbread Fort Village for the 2025 Gingerbread House Contest at The Floyd Country Store. A big thank you to everyone who was able to donate materials for our build.
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This was another big learning opportunity for the class. We spent time in Fort Village visualizing and drawing out our plans – it was a great way to document and assess where each Sapphire is developmentally and to participate in discussion about our many different visions for the project.
On Wednesday, we focused on our individual gingerbread children. Each Sapphire was given the opportunity to mix the frosting with their color of choice and choose from a variety of materials to decorate their own personalized cookie. Thursday’s Learning Lab was spent constructing Fort Village together.
As you can imagine, the Sapphires were very enthusiastic about the variety of yummy materials and practiced great impulse control in using the supplies to build and not eat. The collaboration it took to dye all of the frostings and place them in a rainbow pattern, decorate ice cream cones and cookies to look like trees, use pretzels to build forts and even butterscotch discs to represent our stump circle was impressive.
Blue Mountain School is a progressive, contemplative school in Floyd, where intentional curriculum planning is part of the everyday. “Curriculum Corner” is a bi-weekly column written by Blue Mountain School teachers to share insight and school happenings.