For the past week, our new education team has been busy preparing for the upcoming year. We’ve spent a considerable amount of time talking about our values at the Jewish Enrichment Center. We value children’s unique and significant contributions to our learning community. In order to document their contributions, we record conversations and take pictures throughout our exploration of a theme. We use these notes and photographs to understand the way that children are thinking about big ideas. We can then adjust our plans accordingly to ensure that our learning explorations better meet the children’s needs. In this way, children’s perspectives and understandings become central to our plans for the remainder of the theme.