We have all of our permits!

We received our last permit Thursday afternoon ten minutes before the close of business for the long holiday weekend at the county! That means that we are ready to begin building our buildings on Monday! If you have not been over to the site it is worth the trip. The land is cleared and flat. It has been tamped down and the building pads are ready to accept the concrete for the foundations. The retaining walls are completely finished. The retention pond is also finished. The footing locations have been identified and flagged. You can actually see where the buildings will be now.

In the coming weeks:

1) The footings will be poured and inspected.
2) The foundation will be poured and inspected.
3) The framing and trusses will be installed.

After that it is all finish work- siding, roofing, drywall, etc.

Thank you all for your incredible support these past (extremely stressful) weeks. We are so grateful for your care, concern, and encouragement.

Glimpse: We conducted an experiment in looping this past year. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, looping refers to the movement of teachers with children from classroom to classroom. We decided to move one of the teachers from each classroom last year. In theory, this teacher moves with the children as the expert on the children while the other teachers stay behind as the classroom experts. We read a fair amount of research on this subject and in the end decided that the only way to know if this would work would be to give it a try. This last movement was a large success. We have decided to continue to loop at least one of the teachers when the majority of the children move to the next classroom. This time, we asked the teachers who would like to make the move with the children. This is an excellent opportunity for our teachers to spread their wings and experience a different age group that they may consider working with in the new school. We began this process last month with teacher visits to their new classrooms. The teachers will officially be in their new classrooms beginning tomorrow.

In the future, we intend to continue to work with this system until we find a combination of movements that is unique and best suited to the Little School.