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Getting Started
Getting Started
Welcome to Comini
Welcome to Comini
Why We Do What We Do
Why We Do What We Do
How We Structure Learning
How We Structure Learning
What and How We Learn
What and How We Learn
The Bigger Picture
The Bigger Picture
Resources & Answers
Resources & Answers
Why We Do What We Do
Finding Our Community and the Power of Play
The Origin Story
We took the plunge and started a pandemic pod. Little did we know that this spontaneous response to an immediate crisis would evolve into something much more profound. The name "Comini" came from our daughter's childhood word for coconuts. It later became a perfect backronym: Community Mini. Because that's exactly what we discovered school should be: a place where families with shared values and unique perspectives come together to raise children.
There's nothing quite like a crisis to reveal what truly matters. The pandemic stripped away the familiar structures and routines of education, leaving parents and children to navigate uncharted waters together. What emerged from this disruption wasn't just a stopgap solution, but a revelation about the nature of learning communities.
It began with conversations. Tentative at first, then increasingly animated. A chance mention to a neighbor about our educational concerns. A friend of a friend who was also questioning their child's schooling options. A post in a parenting WhatsApp group that resonated with others.
"I'm worried about my daughter's love of learning," one parent confessed during an early meeting. "She used to be so curious about everything, and now she just asks whether this will be on the test."
"My son needs to move to think," shared another. "Sitting still for hours is a form of torture for him, but he's brilliant when he is allowed to bounce around."
"I want my children to maintain their creativity and critical thinking," said a third. "Not just memorize information they could easily look up."
As these conversations unfolded, we realized we weren't alone in our concerns or in our hopes for something better. Parents from diverse backgrounds, with different educational philosophies and priorities, were nonetheless united by a common instinct: there had to be a better approach than what they had experienced or were witnessing all over again with their child.
What began as casual conversations soon crystallized into a more formal exploration. For many parents, Comini was initially a temporary solution until schools reopened. We were just grateful to have a growing group of children. But what amazed us was how many families chose to stay, canceling admissions to established schools to take a chance on us. We continue to be grateful and keenly aware of our responsibility to these families and their children.
The Power of Community
The strength of Comini lies in its community. We have a wonderful set of families with diverse skills, experiences, and perspectives. We count among our parents professionals in finance, law, management, design, technology, food, music, filmmaking, higher education. This diversity prevents us from getting stuck in theoretical abstractions or echo chambers.
We quickly realized that the traditional model of school as a service, where parents "drop off" their children to be educated by experts, misses something essential. Learning happens best within a web of relationships and shared values. When children see their parents engaged purposefully with their work and passion, when they witness adults collaborating and learning alongside them, they absorb profound lessons about the value and purpose of learning itself.
Unlike traditional schools that often keep parents at arm's length, we embraced them as vital partners. Parents bring their unique expertise to projects and explorations, share their professional knowledge, join in community events, and help shape the direction of our approach.
This involvement is not just about extra hands on deck, though that helps! It's about creating a seamless connection between learning and life. When a parent who designs furniture helps children explore principles of structure and balance, when a musician parent leads an exploration of sound and rhythm, when a doctor parent guides an investigation of the human body, children experience knowledge not as abstract information but as living wisdom embedded in their community.
Perhaps most importantly, this community approach breaks down the artificial barriers between "school" and "real life" that conventional education reinforces. Learning doesn't just happen during designated hours in designated spaces. It happens everywhere, all the time, within relationships that matter.
This doesn't mean we expect parents to become teachers or to bear the primary responsibility for curriculum development. Our facilitators bring expertise in child development, learning processes, and educational design. But we recognize that education works best when it's a collaborative effort reflecting the wisdom of the entire community.
Play: The Natural Learning State
With our community forming, we turned our attention to how children would learn within it. We spent considerable time studying alternative approaches to education like Montessori, Waldorf, and Finnish models, while also exploring the latest insights from neuroscience and developmental psychology.
What emerged from our research and observation was both revolutionary and blindingly obvious: children are designed to learn through play. They are, as we often say, adorable machines for learning, soaking up knowledge, skills, and understanding through exploration, experimentation, and joyful engagement with their world.
Watch a child at play and you witness learning in its natural, most powerful form. Someone building with blocks isn't just playing. They are exploring physics, developing spatial reasoning, practicing problem-solving, and experiencing the emotional journey of trial, error, and success. When children engage in pretend play, becoming doctors, shopkeepers, teachers, parents, they're rehearsing social roles, developing language, practicing perspective-taking, and navigating complex social rules. There's fascinating research on this by Peter Gray if you're curious to dive deeper.
Yet conventional education has systematically separated learning from play, creating an artificial distinction that serves neither. As children progress through traditional schooling, play gets relegated to shorter and shorter "recess" periods. Mere breaks from the "real work" of learning. By the time children are in higher grades, play is largely seen as a distraction or reward, not as a powerful learning modality in its own right.
This separation reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how human development and learning actually work. It assumes that the serious business of acquiring knowledge happens best through direct instruction, worksheets, and tests. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Learning Through Error and Experience
One of the most powerful aspects of play is how it naturally incorporates error and adjustment. Watch children building a tower of blocks. When it topples, they don't need a teacher to tell them something went wrong. They can see it. More importantly, they immediately begin experimenting with different approaches. "What if we make the bottom wider?" "What if we use the rectangular blocks instead of the square ones?"
This cycle of try-observe-adjust is the foundation of all learning. It's how we developed as a species and how each child develops as an individual. Play creates space for this natural process to unfold without the fear of judgment or failure that often accompanies more formal learning settings.
Early childhood is primarily about gathering experiences and making mental models of how the world works through direct engagement with it. Children need to touch, move, build, combine, separate, and transform materials to understand their properties. They need to engage with others to grasp social dynamics. They need to hear and experiment with language to master communication.
Play provides the perfect context for this experiential learning. It offers immediate feedback without judgment. It allows for repetition without boredom. It connects emotional engagement with cognitive development in ways that strengthen both.
We recognize that children don't need to be taught to learn. They need environments that support their natural learning processes. Our role is not to fill them with information but to create contexts where meaningful learning can emerge through play and exploration.
Beyond "Just Playing"
Parents often worry that play-based learning isn't "serious" enough. "Isn't play just for young children?" they ask. "As they get older, don't we need more structure, more discipline, more conventional approaches?"
These concerns reflect our own conditioning about what learning "should" look like. We've been trained to believe that real learning involves sitting still, listening quietly, and completing assigned tasks. Precisely the opposite of play's active, self-directed nature.
But play isn't just fooling around. It's purposeful activity driven by the child's own interests and questions. It's how children make sense of their world and develop the foundational competencies that support all later learning.
The LEGO Foundation's research highlights what we've observed again and again: through play, children develop crucial capabilities that transcend traditional academic boundaries:
- Autonomy and agency: the ability to make meaningful choices and take ownership of learning
- Exploration: comfort with uncertainty and the drive to discover
- Mastery: persistence in developing skills through practice and refinement
- Rigor: precision in thinking and doing
- Discipline: sustained focus on meaningful goals
- Grit: resilience in the face of challenges
- Abstraction: moving from concrete experiences to conceptual understanding
These foundational competencies underlie all academic achievement. They can't be directly taught. They must be developed through experience, particularly the kind of experience that play naturally provides.
We don't worry primarily about the visible peaks of academic performance. We focus on building these foundational capabilities, trusting that when children develop them, the academic skills will follow. Often with surprising speed and depth.
A Learning Community
Bringing together our commitment to community and our understanding of play, Comini has evolved into something more than an alternative school. It's a learning community where children, parents, and facilitators explore together, where boundaries between teaching and learning blur, and where education reconnects with its deepest purpose: not just acquiring information, but developing human potential in all its dimensions.
In the chapters ahead, we'll explore the practical aspects of this approach. How we structure our days, how we handle traditional academic subjects, how we assess progress without traditional testing or grading. But for now, it's enough to understand that everything we do emerges from these core beliefs: that learning happens best in community, and that play and playful exploration are the most natural and powerful way for children to learn.
Our daughter's childhood word for coconuts has become something much more. A name for an approach to education that honors children's natural development, embraces the wisdom of community, and reconnects learning with the joy and purpose that should always accompany it.