For the 2018-19 school year, The Parish School will “formally” adopt Inquiry/Project-Based Learning across grade levels and curricula, even though, really, we’ve been doing it all along. Discover more about inquiry/project-based learning in this article reprinted with permission from Sam Houston State University. Subscribe to our blog and Facebook page to follow along on our journey.

As parents today, we all feel pressure from society to push our kids to learn letters and numbers as soon as they start talking. Read earlier, learn math, write clearly and memorize facts about science or other subjects...Interestingly, this push for academic success at earlier ages has not led to better results. Research emphasizes that rather than grades, social competence is one of two indicators of success in adult life (the other is grit).

What began as passion and determination for supporting students who struggle socially, has turned into a program turning a decade old with clients from across the Houston area. How the Social Thinking program has developed at The Parish School.

The Parish School is fortunate to have one of only five site-based adventure playgrounds in the United States and the only one based at a school. Adventure playgrounds are environments where children create their own worlds and build their own play space with a variety of tools and scrap material. With all of this stuff organized and built by children - with so much freedom, space, tools and child-directed activity, aren't these playgrounds rife with injury? To answer this question, Jill Wood, Director of Adventure Play at The Parish School, teamed with Morgan Leichter Saxby, PhD candidate in Playwork at Leeds Beckett University and Co-Founder of Pop-Up Adventure Play for a comparative study...