A thinking companion for inquiry-led, Reggio-inspired educators.

Reggio-inspired, inquiry-based teaching begins with noticing — a child’s question, a repeated fascination, a moment of wonder that refuses to disappear. Spark begins there too. Share an observation, an emerging interest, or a thread of curiosity from your classroom. Instead of generating rigid lesson plans, Spark helps educators think more deeply about where inquiry might lead, how ideas could evolve, and what possibilities may be waiting beneath the surface. The observation remains yours. The inquiry still belongs to the children. Spark simply supports the thinking in between.

Where it began

I was the only educator at a table full of founders. And I left wondering: what if educators could build too?

I'm Sher Lin. An early childhood educator. A lover of the Reggio Emilia approach. An advocator for inquiry-based learning. A curious soul. Ten years in classrooms: I can read a child's curiosity from across a room. Zero background in tech: I couldn't read a line of code. This is that story.

One very recent afternoon I had lunch with a group of friends — founders, coders, builders. Listening to them talk about turning ideas into reality made something shift in me. I wasn't part of that world. I'm a preschool teacher. But they never made me feel excluded. At one point, someone looked at me and said: "If you've been wanting to try AI — this is your sign."

I went home thinking about that. A lot.

"I know what a meaningful provocation feels like.
I know how long it takes.
And I know how hard it is
when you're already exhausted."

Try Spark by Sher →

The real problem

The knowledge was never the problem. The blank page on a Sunday night was.

Ten years of designing curriculum by hand. Of sitting with a child's question all week — turning it over, watching how it shifts, deciding what to introduce next. That part I love. That part I'm good at.

The hard part is Sunday evening. The observation is fresh. The idea is there. But translating it into a provocation, a material invitation, a question worth asking — that takes a specific kind of energy. And after a week of full presence in the classroom, that energy is often the first thing to go.

Generic lesson templates don't help. They're designed for a different kind of teaching — one that moves from objective to activity, not from observation to inquiry. What Reggio-inspired educators needed wasn't another planner. It was something that could think alongside them.

That gap is what Spark was built to close.

The night it happened

"What if I just try building something?" — and then I didn't stop.

I was about to wash up when the idea hit me. I opened my laptop.

I was Googling every few minutes — learning to code, breaking things, fixing things. Trying to decode error messages that looked alien to me. But I refused to stop. Because isn't that what learning is all about?

The first prototype of Spark existed at 3:33am. It wasn't perfect. But it existed. And from that rough first draft, I kept refining through testing, adjusting and user feedback — until it became the tool you can use today.

Tools I'd never heard of — until that night
      Cursor
      Node.js
      Claude API
      JavaScript
      GitHub
      Render
    

The solution

Spark: Built on ten years of knowing what a good provocation actually feels like.

Type in something you observed. Or a topic the children keep returning to. Choose the age group. What Spark returns isn't generated from a database of lesson ideas — it's shaped by a decade of understanding how inquiry actually moves in a room:

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Environment Provocations

Three Reggio-inspired invitations to set up in your space — each one designed so the child discovers the question themselves.

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Inquiry Questions

Open-ended questions to sit with the child — not to prompt answers, but to keep wondering alive.

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Suggested Materials

Specific open-ended materials chosen for this topic — each one lets the child lead.

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The Big Anchor Question

One question that holds the whole inquiry — poetic, unresolvable, and worth returning to all semester.

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Environment Setup Guide

Surface, light, arrangement, what to remove, and how to position yourself — so the space does the teaching.

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Documentation Prompts

What to write down, what to notice in the body, and what to watch for when the child returns — across words, movement, and time.

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Where Next?

A signal to watch for that tells you the inquiry has shifted — and a gentle nudge toward what to introduce next.

Every output is built around inquiry-based pedagogy, open-ended learning, and child-led exploration — not worksheet-style planning. Spark is designed to amplify the educator's existing knowledge, not override it.

There's a 'Start With A Moment You Noticed' field for educators who type in their observation. Instead of typing "Insects", you might write: "Leo and Sarah spent 20 minutes watching an ant carry a leaf across the brick walkway." Spark takes that specific moment and builds from it — so what comes back grows from your child's actual curiosity, not a generic theme.

The teacher's eye remains the most important input. Spark just helps you trust what it's already seeing.

Ten years in real classrooms

The pedagogy behind Spark isn't theoretical. Here's where it was built.

Spark didn't come from reading about Reggio Emilia. It came from ten years of learning to read children — noticing when a question was worth following, when a material was doing the teaching, when an inquiry had shifted and needed a new door. These are four of many projects that shaped what Spark understands.

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Identity & Belonging, PN

A multi-week inquiry with children aged 18 months to 3 years, built around the provocation: Who are you, and where do you belong? The environment was the primary teacher — family photographs, natural materials, loose parts arranged to invite rather than instruct. Children returned to the same photographs across sessions, brought objects from home without being asked, named things in the room as theirs. Documentation panels made their thinking visible to families and to the children themselves — not as display, but as ongoing conversation. Recognised by the Centre Leader as a strong example of child-led inquiry.

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Little Designers, K1

A semester-long inquiry with K1 children (aged 4–5) into physical disability and empathy. The provocation was a real problem: design something that helps someone who moves differently than you. Partnerships were intentional — children had to think across difference to think well. When a prototype didn't account for something, children rebuilt. When a design didn't hold, they asked why. What emerged wasn't just devices — it was children constructing a theory of what bodies need. Blueprints, public presentations in their own words, and a community visit to SPD Singapore — because the problem was real enough to take seriously.

🌍

Flavours of the World: A Semester of Cultural Inquiry with Local & International Families, K1

A semester-long cultural inquiry with K1 children (aged 4–5), built around a resource already in the room: eight countries represented by the children and families themselves. The question was whether shared making — cooking, sculpting, singing — could build connection that surface-level cultural awareness never quite reaches. Local children were assigned across international groups. Each week, a family came in to cook, share, and sit alongside the children. What emerged wasn't managed. Children began crossing into each other's stories — asking questions during cooking, choosing partners across difference, speaking about families that weren't theirs as if they were. The whole school became the audience. It could.

🐦

Colours of the Wind — Inquiry on Bird Species, K2

A semester-long bird inquiry with K2 children (aged 5–6). The inquiry began with a Birds of Paradise excursion, but what I was watching for wasn't excitement — it was what the children kept returning to. Two families independently brought in real bird nests as they learned that the children were interested in the inquiry. That wasn't planned. That was the children's curiosity reaching beyond the classroom. We spent time across sessions examining, measuring, and identifying species. Then came a layer of home collaboration: parents had conversations with their children about which bird each child wanted to research and focus on — the choice was the child's. That became the anchor. Over multiple sessions, children created individual clay birds and painted them, each one rooted in a bird they had chosen, studied, and could speak about. The question underneath the whole inquiry was structural: where do we see similarities and differences as birds? Spark is built to open that kind of sustained wondering.

What Spark looks like

sparkbysher.onrender.com

What educators see when they open Spark — clean, focused, ready.

10+

Years of pedagogy behind the prompt

15+

Ideas generated per topic

Age groups — Toddlers to K2

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Designed for every educator

What this taught me about learning

Twelve hours before I built it, I'd never written a line of code.

Something clicked that night — not just technically, but in how I understand learning itself. I've spent a decade watching children encounter things they don't know how to do yet. Watching them stay with the discomfort, find a way through, discover something about themselves in the process.

Building Spark felt like that. Every error message was a provocation. Every fix was a documentation moment. And somewhere around 3:33am, something existed that hadn't before.

That's what I want Spark to be for the educators who use it — not a shortcut, but a thinking companion. Something that meets you in the moment of wondering what to do next, and helps you find your way in.

A provocation isn't a lesson. It's an opening.

A second problem

The observations were already happening. They just had nowhere to go.

Spark solved the blank-page problem. But there was still the other one.

I was the teacher opening one iPhone Note after another, trying to piece together what I'd written about a child — notes from the classroom, where so much is happening at the same time. Scrolling through voice memos at 9pm, not because I forgot what I meant, but because I needed to find what the child had actually said. That recording existed. I just had to find it. And when I was about to share an update with a parent, I'd realise I was mentally flipping through apps to pull it all together. With almost twenty children in a class, that's a lot of piecing together.

The Documentation Reflection Companion is what I built for that. One place for all of a child's observations — photos, voice memos, written notes — organised across time. So when the moment comes, the documentation is already there.

What Reflect looks like

reflect.sparkbysher.com

The Reflect tool showing a class list, each child with their observations gathered over time

Every child's observations in one place — photos, voice memos, notes, gathered over time.

Try the Reflection Companion →

See what's here.

See all tools →

One tool for when you need a provocation — or just more scaffolding for an idea you're already sitting with.

One tool for documenting on the go — and when there's enough, looking across it all to find the patterns, questions, and connections you couldn't see in a single entry.

Spark by Sher