Vasaio Atelier

When was the last time you spent a stormy morning with watercolors in crystal vessels, and moody beats over the airwaves?

Yeah, me too.

We are learning to be deeply inspired by the magic of the outdoors, the woods, and all the creatures of the world. 🌳🦊🌸

To be a child is to effortlessly bridge the gap between our imagination and reality.

🌸 🌺 H E R B S A N D S U C H ! 🌺 🌸

Today, the preschool class was invited to explore the many scents of our garden beds. We had bundles of sweet mint, mulberry leaves, basil, dried rose petals, and 2 different kinds of sage. Everyone worked their station differently.

Some students loved smashing up leaves in their pestal and mortar. A few decided that cutting flowers using scissors was the best was to explore. A handful of our future chefs chopped up the plants with a knife prepping in the kitchen.

Lets not forget those who simply wanted to peel and handle florals and herbs to savor the scents! This beautiful summer invitation to explore left our entire play yard smelling wonderfully fragrant. 🌼

Hawaiian black sand, sea turtles and all the beautiful trimmings. Ms. Kayleigh sure knows how to take us away!

Water play is incredibly fun and stimulating for everyone. But, when you add color, every drop is now perfume, potion or soup! Mixing colored waters is an easy and hands on method of teaching the basics of primary and secondary colors.

Some of the boys have been especially curious about names lately—constantly asking me to write their names and their friends’ names. It’s been wonderful to see several of our friends already recognizing letters and beginning to connect them to their sounds!
To nurture that excitement, we explored the alphabet together today in a big, hands-on way. I drew large letters on the floor so our whole class could gather around and participate at once. We used colorful loose parts—wooden beads, cones, and spheres—to trace the shapes of the letters or create our own fun patterns along the lines.
As we worked, we talked about which letters our names start with and brainstormed other words that begin with those same sounds. We also discovered how some letters can make more than one sound, sparking great conversations and “aha!” moments.
This kind of playful, multi-sensory learning helps children develop strong letter recognition, phonemic awareness, and fine motor skills while making the experience engaging and memorable. By using their whole bodies and working collaboratively with friends, the alphabet comes alive in a way that feels natural and joyful.

On a dark, rainy morning we brought our own light — literally. The children explored how light, shadow, and dimension transform abstract concepts in geometry, math, and spatial reasoning into something visible, tangible, and deeply understandable.
By manipulating colorful and transparent blocks on the overhead projector, their creations came alive on the wall in giant, glowing form. They traced, extended, and transformed their ideas with markers, turning projection into a bridge between imagination and mathematical thinking.

What the children are learning through this experience:

Spatial awareness & geometry — understanding how shapes change when rotated, overlapped, or moved in space

Cause and effect — discovering how positioning, layering, and transparency affect size, color, and shadow

Transformation & perspective — seeing how a small block becomes a massive image, teaching scale, proportion, and viewpoint

Symmetry, pattern & prediction — testing “what happens if…” and observing mathematical relationships

Representation & symbolic thinking — moving from 3D object to 2D shadow to their own drawn additions

Collaboration & scientific inquiry — sharing ideas, negotiating space, and building theories together

Painting our tree using three different shades of brown and 3 different shades of green. Open discussions included thoughts about how different parts of the leaves or bark had different colors and textures. "P" noticed that in areas where the bark was peeled, the trunk underneath was more of a red brown color. "R" noticed that the underside of the leaves look a lighter green than the top part. We were forced to have a few trees removed lately, but we also planted a few. Those big trees have been missed by everyone.

When are beautiful berries not berries? When you decide they are the perfect medium for your floral artwork.

When the sun is shining upon our giant twisted tree in the fall, looking up from the ground is a magical sight. Leaves fall when the wind hits and we watch it rain in shades of gold and blazing orange.

That is the time we sleep outside.