Adventure Awaits

What might risky, challenging learning opportunities offer children as they build learner identities infused with courage, creativity, resilience, reflective risk assessment, and empathy-focused reciprocal social relationships?

We want our children to experience elements of surprise and wonderment in our space (and beyond).

Our intention is to provoke children’s curiosity and allow them to feel a sense of ambiguity and awe in their surroundings. We work to create a space that is rich with possibilities, where questions are asked and explored, and where risks are taken. Our shared understanding, gained over 14 years of these adventures, is that if we want to encourage flexibility of the mind, we must provide a flexible environment and agency for children to choose to investigate the people, places, and things that matter to them.

We track children’s interests through writing formative assessments, grounded in the context of children’s lived experiences, and consider ways to provide provocations to widen and deepen our engagements with children’s learning investigations. This means that we regularly go out into the community in search of meaningful experiences.

We are very aware of the safety issues around excursions; therefore, we carefully plan to ensure we are ‘hazard aware’ but ‘not risk averse’.