Find & Seek is currently a concept: it started as a project-based early childhood laboratory that focused on materials exploration, artistic creation, play and storytelling. For two years two colleagues curated and presented a beautiful array of natural objects and recycled materials and facilitated as children in Brooklyn gave form to what they imagined. We listened to and shone our light on children’s original stories, using educational tools such as dialogue, inquiry, creative process, collaboration and documentation. Then we diverged . . . and kept talking and thinking together. Now we are reimagining what it means to find, and to seek . . .

The Whole Child

Play and the arts are vehicles through which children tap into their many ways of knowing. When they become well-versed in play and the arts, they are better equipped to solve problems, think divergently and live creative and fulfilling lives. The spaces we develop shine a light into the experiential processes and interdisciplinary methods that help create a holistic framework to support children’s healthy growth. We take care to remember at every step that our children are not test scores or statistics, but whole human beings with beautiful minds and hearts, capable of inventing marvelous and unique ideas.

Creative Reuse

Our materials lab promotes diversity in children's play experiences. We source and curate a wide spectrum of natural and recycled resources that lend themselves to open-ended, imaginative building projects. Translucent. Luminous. Brilliant. Smooth. Soft. Beautiful. We invite children to use materials as “loose parts” in meaningful play scenarios. We encourage dreaming big and finding creative solutions. We believe that freedom to take creative risks supports divergent thinking. Inspiration and innovation are the tools and treasures we hope for children to take with them far into their academic and social futures.

Environment as Teacher

Children are informed by the environments they inhabit. In an urban center like New York City, and in gritty neighborhoods like Red Hook, children are both fragile and resilient. In addition to creating a library of beautiful objects and facilitating these objects' use in varied educational settings, Find & Seek accesses nature by utilizing outdoor spaces as classrooms. Natural landscapes, especially in NYC, provide unique opportunities for transformation of space as well as a deepened sensory connection to the outdoors. Dialogue within outdoor spaces leads children to develop a multitude of expressive vocabularies.