“Our city is the Sea Lions!”

Earlier this year, two children in the Sea Lion Room moved with their families out of California. What emerged from the children’s love and care for their friends, and an interest in keeping in touch with them, was curiosity and new understandings of the ways in which our world is organized. It all started with learning about how to send a letter and field trip to a local postal service mailbox. 

The Sea Lion children had gathered notes to send to their friends and when putting these notes into an envelope, the teachers used the opportunity to explain what is written on the envelope so that the mail carriers know where to deliver it. The teachers asked the children how they thought they could send it and the children suggested finding a mailbox. The next week, the group went on a field trip to a postal service mailbox.  Along the way, they started identifying all of the residential mailboxes in the neighborhood and asking questions about the streets and numbers they were seeing. “As this was happening, we started taking notes on what they were asking and once we got back, all they were talking about was mailboxes and mail,” said Sea Lion Lead Teacher, Ofelia. 

Since the reopening of the CEC under pandemic guidelines, the children of the Sea Lion room each have their own designated indoor play space that they call their ‘house.’ In the beginning of the year, all of the houses were numbered, and the teachers encouraged the children to come up with names for their houses. “After the field trip walk in the neighborhood, we noticed that the children began coming up with their own street names for their houses” Ofelia shared. “Because we rotate houses each week, we talked to them about how when they move to a new house, the name of the house stays the same because that is the address of that place.” The children came up with all sorts of street names, from Flower to Tomato and even Crocodile. Each week, when the children move to a new house, they all know what address they will be at next.  

On their next excursion into the neighborhood, the teachers noticed that the children were identifying all of the numbers they found on the street curbs and houses. They even identified the numbers on the street signs, which opened up a conversation with the children about the different types of street names: lanes, boulevards, courts, etc. As soon as the children were back in the room, they began updating their addresses with these new street identifiers.  

With their updated addresses, the children returned to the idea of sending mail and soon began to write letters to each other, sending them through a special Sea Lion mailbox and receiving them via delivery to their ‘houses’. This invited curiosity and questions about stamps, with the children creating their own designs, along with the encouraging of their parents to send mail to their ‘house’ as well. The Sea Lion children even received mail from the neighbors in the Eagle room who sent them a letter asking about how to start a garden.  

The teachers used the children’s eagerness to learn about addresses to expand the discussion and deepen the curriculum by introducing the children to the idea of a city. “We asked the children, ‘what is the name of our city?’ Two of the children got it right away and announced, ‘Our city is the Sea Lions!’” said Ofelia. “This is the perfect example of the emergent curriculum we practice at the CEC. The children use their curiosity to begin to ask questions, and we as teachers follow that natural interest and develop curriculum and opportunities that support the direction their curiosity is leading them towards.” The children of the Sea Lions have learned important information about place and space, numeracy, the postal system, geography, and have even initiated their own practice in printing letters and numbers to be able to send their mail. Ofelia shared, “We don’t need to sit the children down at a desk and have them memorize concepts or copy letters; by leading with their curiosity the children bring their own questions, motivation, and excitement to learn, and we are ready to support and guide them wherever they choose to take it.”