Tinker Preschool

Tinker’s Transitional Kindergarten Pine Class had an unforgettable experience meeting San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie!

In the days leading up to the visit, our Pine teachers provoked curiosity with the children to learn about the role of a mayor, discovering fun and deep connections between city leadership and their own daily lives. Their excitement and preparation turned into a real-life learning moment when they held their very own interview session conference with Mayor Lurie.

Prepared with thoughtful questions like, “How many things does a mayor do?”, “What’s your favorite playground—and do you help keep it clean?”, and the all-important, “What’s your favorite ice cream?”, our students impressed everyone with their curiosity and confidence. (Spoiler alert: Mayor Lurie’s favorite flavor is Mint Chocolate Chip!)

A huge thank you to our incredible teachers and to Mayor Lurie’s office for helping bring civic learning to life. With collaborative young minds like these, the next generation of leaders is already asking the big questions!

Thank you Slide Ranch for welcoming our Owl and Duck classes last week! The Clement campus took a visit and immersed themselves in the environmental education that Slide Ranch offers.

Their day included learning about and milking goats, exploring chicken coops and feeding techniques, using their 5 senses in the edible gardens, visiting the beehives and sharing knowledge about honey, and ending the day with lunch and a coastal view.

We can’t wait to go back and visit again!

Looking back at the month of April we can’t help but feel an immense amount of gratitude for none other than our planet Earth! Our natural world has been such a crucial element in the work that we do here at Tinker. Apart from just once a year, our Tinker teachers strive to create learning opportunities for children to understand and respect the outdoors. Everyday should be Earth Day! 🌎🌱

No matter rain or shine, you can count on our Tinker students to be out and about exploring what our parks and forests have to offer!🤩

With a change in seasons, our Owl and Duck classes have been observing the change in environments and acknowledging the curiosities or questions that have emerged from the student’s observations. We feel a large sense of gratitude that our dedicated Tinker teachers and children collaborate on incorporating the natural environment as invitations for hands-on provocations & discoveries.

We can’t wait to see what other curiosities will bloom for our students this season!🌸

What a way to end the month with these Lunar New Year celebrations!🐍🎇 Here we have our Duck Class enjoying their planned trip to SF Chinatown’s to further their explorations of Chinese culture this month. We also have our Owl Class focusing on the experience of hand-making dumplings and learning the importance of traditions with foods.

To end our week with more joy and celebrations, our wonderful staff and families came together to organize a parade at our beloved Mountain Lake Park. After the parade, our PGA even brought a lion dancer to perform at our campus! How lucky are we to have such a dedicated and involved school community?!?

Happy Lunar New Year!

We want to start off 2025 by shining a spotlight on our hard-working Tinker teachers! They have been continuing to create spaces that reflect the cultures of their students and the community. One of our priorities at Tinker is to ensure the sense of belonging to all students and family by focusing on the importance of diversity. As the Lunar New Year approaches, the Duck and Owl classes have been exploring the meaning of this celebration and its importance to many in our community.

As November comes to an end, we can’t help but look back at the month and feel an immense amount of gratitude for our Tinker community, our beautiful city, and our dedicated teachers.

Whether it be raining or shining, you can always count on our amazing teachers to continue to lead our students to all of the parks and places in SF to explore and learn from.

We are officially one month into our ‘24-‘25 school year and we couldn’t be more excited about all of the new connections and new discoveries being made everyday here at Tinker. Our teachers dedicate their hard work and planning to create many invitations and spaces for all of our curious students. Along with the learning experiences happening in our indoor learning environment (the classroom!), the outdoors are also consistently used as a “third teacher” along with our Tinker teachers and children.

Stay tuned to find out where all of these new connections/discoveries will take our Tinkerlings!

Happy Holidays from our Tinker family to yours! Our Clement campus sure has been busy with learning about the geometrical shapes of snowflakes, learning how to make snow people from clay, donating toys/clothes, and even enjoying pancakes in our pajamas thanks to our lovely parents/families! We’ve had an incredible and event-filled year and we could not have done it without our fantastic staff and support from our families. We are excited for what 2024 will bring!

In this photo we have Teacher LayLay from the Garden Class facilitating an activity where each child had shared something that they learned about spiders. After sharing something that they had learned, they would then pass the roll of string to another friend. At the end of the activity each child had shared several times, thus creating a web like structure!

Children learn a lot from other children when given the space/opportunity and it’s so great to see how intentional our Tinker teachers are with this core value from Reggio!

Here we have our Garden Class learning about patterns, symmetry, and balance. With construction being so prevalent in the city we live in, the Garden Teachers infused building projects into their curriculum to encourage the connection between the children’s outdoor environment to the inside of their classroom. Specific materials were offered and the teachers watched and listened to see what theories the children began/continued to explore.

Keep up the great work Garden Class! We can’t wait to see where these explorations will take them.