Offerings

Making and Supporting Offerings

Curriculum offerings by facilitators are primarily “hands on,” experiential and developmentally appropriate for each age group. Our programme aims to be rich with opportunities, both child-initiated and facilitator-offered. This type of education preserves the desire to learn and helps children gain experience in finding their way to the information they need. When interest and experience meet information, the knowledge children gain is deep and lasting. Through their active engagement in their own interests, children learn skills and concepts and master the process of learning.

An offering might happen only once, or become so popular it recurs weekly or daily.

Offerings may require commitments beforehand because they involve travel logistics, purchasing specific materials, or taking volunteer time, and it’s important to make that clear when proposing the offering.

There are a few different ways that you can support offerings:

• Introduce offerings that are exciting to you. Remember to hold space for offerings brought up by the students so the space doesn’t become filled with only offerings made by adults.

• Attend offerings made by students.

• Reorganize the space so materials are visible and easy to access. Think about laying “invitations to play” attractively around the building. Spontaneous play with new tools or ideas often leads to recurring offerings based around those interests.

Sometimes, offerings get scheduled but don’t happen. It could be for any number of reasons - the regular participants all happen to be offsite on a field trip, the kids who intended to play cooperative games are absorbed in finishing their watercolour paintings, the members of math club have been struck by what a beautiful day it is outside and find themselves too consumed in tree-climbing to come back inside... As long as there wasn’t a commitment required, this is fine.

The hardest part about supporting offerings is releasing your expectations about who will or won’t attend. Actually, choosing not to attend an offering can be as important a learning experience as going to one: struggles to limit work-in-progress, estimate how much time a game or task will take to complete, or balance long-term goals with short-term satisfactions are skill that children develop over time, through trial-and-error.