Curiosity Under Construction

In May 2025, students from age 3 to Grade 12 gathered in the Middle School quad to mark the groundbreaking of The Hub for Human Impact. As the building took shape in the center of campus, construction became part of the daily landscape.

But for some of the school’s youngest students, simply seeing it wasn’t enough. They watched. They wondered. They wanted to know how it all worked. 

For the 3- and 4-year-olds in the Early Childhood Center (ECC), a construction site taking shape just beyond their classrooms offered something irresistible: enormous piles of dirt, powerful machines, steel beams rising into the air, and people at work making it all happen.

ECC Director Maria Curtis saw an opportunity to turn that natural fascination into an invitation to investigate.

Before the children began investigating, Ms. Curtis started with their teachers. At an August workshop, she invited ECC teachers to become investigators themselves and sent them out to observe the construction from different places around campus. With an eye toward what might capture a young child’s attention, they recorded its sounds and sketched shapes and textures.

Back together, they mapped what they had seen and wondered about: workers, movement, materials, machines, and transformation. Then they considered what children might do with those same observations.

The investigators became builders, too, using materials to create their own versions of The Hub and thinking about what children might gain from doing the same. 

 

Ms. Curtis wasn’t giving teachers a construction curriculum to take back to their classrooms. The ECC has clear learning goals and curriculum standards, but teachers also have the freedom to build from students’ interests. The workshop encouraged them to notice what caught their students’ attention and find ways to build on that interest.

Then it was the children’s turn to show where their interests would lead.

Soon, children peered through openings in the construction fence and watched the work from different places around campus. Back in their classrooms, they drew, built, experimented, and asked more questions.

For one class, the enormous piles of dirt caught their attention. Where had it come from? Where would it go? How could anyone move so much of it?

Others focused on the machinery, watching cranes maneuver steel beams high above the site and wondering how workers could move something so large—and whether it was safe.

In another class, children began recreating what they saw. They made observational drawings, painted craft sticks to match the colors they noticed on the beams, and experimented with ways to connect their materials and make their structures stand. 

What might look like play was also how children tested ideas, solved problems, and made sense of what they were seeing. 

“Play is really practicing for life,” Ms. Curtis said.

And sometimes a child’s interest took the class somewhere no one expected. During a daily walk to PE, a student noticed how hard the builders were working and suggested making them a card. So they did. Students decorated a card and dictated messages of thanks and encouragement.



For Ms. Curtis, that’s part of the teacher’s role: notice what captures a child’s attention, then help them take it further. Teachers can provide materials to experiment with, ask questions that deepen their thinking, and find natural ways to incorporate skills such as math and language.

Over time, Ms. Curtis said, they become the “little experts,” able to share what they know and reflect on how much they’ve learned.

Learning Beyond the Classroom
Sometimes finding answers meant turning to people who knew the project firsthand. Assistant Head of School and Chief Operations Officer Kevin Worth joined the ECC teachers’ initial workshop to share his knowledge of the Hub.

When Ms. Curtis asked whether openings could be left in the construction screening at children’s eye level, the project team made it happen. Mr. Worth also arrived at the ECC one day with a cart loaded with toy construction vehicles for students to use in the sand.

“Delivering toy trucks to the ECC students was a special moment because it connected the construction happening around them to a sense of wonder and imagination,” Mr. Worth said. “Seeing their enthusiasm reminded all of us why building spaces for students is such meaningful work.”

The connection extended to the people building the Hub. With help from the school’s operations team, students put on hard hats and met Dempsey Construction project manager “Mr. Cody,” who accepted their thank-you card and answered their questions. He hung the card in the construction office, where the entire crew could see it, and kept it there for the rest of the project. Now that they knew Mr. Cody, the children began looking for him during their walks past the site.

For Ms. Curtis, that willingness to participate says something about the community surrounding the children.

“There are people on this campus who aren’t educators but are fully here for our students as well,” she said. When children wanted to know more, their teachers could draw on the people and expertise around them.

A New View
Now, after months of watching, wondering, and building, the view is changing again. The piles of dirt are gone. The steel beams students watched dangling from cranes are part of a finished building. And as LJCDS cuts the ribbon and opens The Hub, children who watched it take shape will finally experience it from a new perspective: the inside.

They have drawn it, built their own versions, met some of the people who made it possible, and watched it transform piece by piece before their eyes.

But perhaps what they built along the way matters just as much: the confidence to ask questions and discover where their curiosity can lead.