At The Corky Lily in Madison, two of our five rooms are built entirely around what a child imagines and chooses.
The first is our Sensory and Light Room. The lights stay low in there all day while projectors send gentle movement across the walls, sometimes swimming turtles, sometimes a whole galaxy. Children explore light tables, easels with all sorts of materials to paint on, peg boards, sensory tables made for the room, and sand and water tables. The soft light and the slow movement invite a child to settle in and stay with one idea for a good long while.
We also keep loose parts, which are everyday materials with no set purpose. Children are free to carry them, sort them, stack them, and put them together however they like. At the Lily that includes recycled materials and old toys, which children take apart and turn into something new that nobody asked them for.
A stretch in the Sensory and Light Room often begins with a story. The materials that come out afterward have something to do with that story, and from there the making belongs to the child. Jessyca Creasy-Lopez, who started the Corky schools, calls the room a creator’s dream, and children can splatter paint where they want in it. There is a lesson underneath what they are doing, and the shape of it is theirs.
The second room is our atelier, which is the French word for a studio. Children use real tools there. They cut cardboard themselves and build with it, with sand, water, and other materials to handle alongside. A child who cuts a piece of cardboard to the size they meant is doing physics, planning, and fine motor work all at once, and doing it because they had a shape in mind first.
Six to eight children will work in each of these rooms at a time, and no two of them are working on the same thing. Groups will come in for about an hour and then head back to their own room.
Children will come to the Lily enrolled in the program itself, so the whole building belongs to them across a week. Two teachers hold these rooms all day. They choose what goes on the tables and what a child meets at the door, and that creative authority sits with the people who spend their days in there.
Freedom Hurter, our director in Madison, describes how our teachers work: “The child is the leader, and the teacher is a partner. We keep them safe, and we listen to what their brain needs. We believe children think with their hands, and these rooms are built on that.”