What is The Birdsall House Way?

 Hi and welcome to The Birdsall House Way blog.  My name is Kelly Raines AKA Ms Kelly and I founded Birdsall House in 2015 along with my friend Nikolas Huffman.  I had worked in early childhood education for 25 years and in numerous centers during that time. 

Over the last 5 years Birdsall House has proven to be everything I hoped it would be and I'd like to share a bit about that with you. Our focus is on science and the arts, with those as starting points the learning grows. Here is an example. 

Albert Einstein is credited as having said:

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

We agree!

At Birdsall House we have no set plans on where the days learning will go.  We observe and look for opportunities to expand on what the children are doing. Here is a great example using a modern fairy tale.

One day one of the children asked one of our teachers to tell a story.  The teacher decided to tell a very animated version of The Lord of The Rings, complete with action and voices, the children were enthralled.

The children went home that night talking about Gandalf, Frodo, and Bilbo and their parents were surprised and thrilled. 

The next day one of our students brought in a LOTR sketch book so they could see the characters.

The children continued to ask for the story to be told and to discuss the story and use it as inspiration for pretend play. 

The next week one of the children brought in a map of Middle Earth.  Everyone gathered around to look at where the different places in the story were.  They explored the map key and discussed the hills, valleys and other aspects of the map.