Tiger Butter Pancakes

Tiger Butter!

This week brought a very fun and ongoing studio partnership with our amazing in-house storyteller (and Head of School!), Bekke.

Bekke shared the tale of some rather vain tigers whose antics eventually turn them into tiger butter and, naturally, what are you gonna make with tiger butter? Tiger butter pancakes. So what else could we do but spend the day making pancakes?

The children asked that I share our very simple studio recipe.  We made two different varieties but this is by far the easier of the two: oats, eggs, a ripe banana, baking powder, a splash of vinegar, a sprinkle of salt, and a teaspoon of cinnamon. Blend it all up, pour it onto the griddle, and tope with tiger butter (room temp. butter mixed with honey) voilà: Tiger Butter Pancakes!

Enjoy the story, the cooking, and the children making the whole thing their own.

Natural Scientists

This week, we invited the children to join us for a little Belly Time (lying together on a rug, magnifying glasses in hand) to examine one mysterious green object in the middle.

We didn’t tell them what it was. We just looked.

What do you notice?

“It’s bumpy and it’s smooth.”

“When you knock on it, it makes a clicking noise.”

“The top looks different than the bottom.”

“It’s calm. It’s not moving.”

What do you wonder?

“I wonder if it grows from a plant.”

“I wonder if it’s a cucumber.”

“I wonder what it looks like inside.”

"I wonder what it would taste like.”

“I wonder if it’s a fruit or a vegetable.”

And finally: What does it remind you of?

“A garden.”

“Summer.”

“A zucchini.”

“I know, I know… let's make Zucchini soup.”

“I think we could make soup with it.”

So the zucchini made its way into the studio.

We looked, chopped, cooked and tasted. The soup itself received mixed reviews. But we did enjoy plenty of conversation along the way.

This Year's Messy Question: 2026-2027

 "Whether you think you can or think you can’t—you’re right.”

-Henry Ford

As you watch your child walk into school, some for the first time, your memory drifts back to the days when they relied on the warmth of your embrace for mobility. Then they began to roll and scoot and pull themselves up on any nearby furniture.

Do you remember the enthusiasm you met them with? Kneeling nearby, arms outstretched, grinning from ear to ear, saying, Come to me.

Were you discouraged by the inevitable tumble as they approached their first steps? Of course not. We expect them to fall. We don’t even view those tumbles as mistakes. That is just how learning happens.

Somehow, we lose sight of this over the years. We forget that mistakes are an essential part of learning. As we age, many of us begin to veer away from trying new things or taking on challenges. Why?

Many of us have internalized the belief that mistakes make us less somehow. Many of us have also had ample experiences where our mistakes were penalized rather than seen as part of learning. By the time we leave high school, we may have already equated mistakes with failure.

But nothing could be farther from the truth. And it turns out that knowing mistakes are necessary makes a world of difference.

When we believe intelligence and skills are malleable rather than fixed, we respond differently to mistakes. In fact, the belief that we can learn from a mistake actually predicts how much we improve after making one. How much we learn.

What if, then, we could help children stay curious about mistakes rather than afraid of them? In other words, what can mistake-making teach us about staying in a relationship with possibility?

Those questions will be guiding our work in the Studio this year.

Join us as we embrace the steps and tumbles that cultivate intrinsic motivation, resilience, grit, curiosity, and a mindset of possibility.

I look forward to another wonderful year as we explore this question together.

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

-Thomas Edison