This month, our garden has become an excavation site.
The children arrived to find fossils and dinosaurs hidden in the soil, along with the tools real anthropologists use to clean and examine what they uncover. What followed was exactly the kind of morning that makes Tesoro special: pure curiosity, deep engagement, and a whole lot of dirt.
Meeting children where their interests are
This month’s garden theme grew directly out of what our children love. They are diggers. They are explorers. They are obsessed with dinosaurs, with creatures from long ago, with things hidden underground. So our teaching team leaned into that energy and built an experience around it.
Fossil Mining and Dinosaurs in the Garden gave children the chance to dig through the soil and discover what was buried there: fossils, dinosaur figures, and other treasures waiting to be found. Once they made a discovery, they used real tools provided by the school to carefully brush and clean what they had uncovered, exactly the way an anthropologist would.
Why this kind of play matters
There is enormous value in pretend play that connects to real-world roles and processes. When a child picks up a brush and carefully cleans a fossil, they are practicing patience, fine motor skills, and attention to detail. When they describe what they found and where, they are building vocabulary and narrative language. When they compare their find to a classmate’s, they are engaging in early scientific thinking.
At Tesoro, the garden is not just a place to grow plants. It is a place to grow thinkers.
Imagination and discovery, together
What made this theme so wonderful was the way it wove imagination and discovery together. The children were scientists. They were explorers. They were anthropologists. And they were completely, joyfully absorbed in every moment of it.
This is what learning looks like at Tesoro: hands in the dirt, eyes full of wonder, and something new discovered every single time.