Today, the four-year-olds will learn how to sequence the letters of the alphabet through an endeavor involving treasure maps. All will create pirate ships of their own, including one with a wonderfully makeshift plank forged from a pair of chopsticks. Later, the ships will be waterproofed and then launched armada-style during what teacher Dina Hamaoui calls “a big yahoo in the park.”
In the afternoon, the students will log some restorative minutes in the therapeutic sand area. They’ll gab via the colored, illuminated speaking tubes that snake from one end of the building to the other along the ceiling. Perhaps they’ll do some yoga in the padded world o’ whimsy that is the Wonder Room, which boasts a small rock wall and the type of light-up floor commonly associated with discos. And they’ll do it all with a curious glint in their eyes that is rarely seen nowadays outside the presence of a Harry Potter tome or a Wii.
“It’s important to me that they learn the alphabet,” says Brad Choyt, the head of school. “But it’s just as important to me how they learn it.” (He says this, of course, as we sit on chairs sized for three-year-olds.)
The idea for the Blue School arose when Goldman, Stanton, and Wink began having kids of their own. While they weren’t actively displeased with the existing options for preschoolers, they weren’t blown away by them either. The problem, they thought, was that classroom strategies and curricula hadn’t kept up-to-date with recent learnings in everything from philosophy to neuroscience.
As Renee Rollieri, a Blue School cofounder, a visual artist and arts therapist, and the mom of a student, puts it, “We became parents and we saw what was out there, but nobody was paying enough attention to social and emotional learning. None of the schools prioritized the way people treat each other. Education, especially now, needs to be responsive to the culture we’re in.”
Goldman condenses the thinking behind the Blue School more succinctly, saying, “It was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea. What if school were fun?’ ”