When Kids Learn to Dream Inside the Lines

I saw a post recently from a public school teacher who gave her second-grade class a “Yes Day.” The idea was simple: the kids could come up with anything they wanted to do—as long as it was safe and they could clean up afterward—and the teacher would say yes.

She shared the list her students created and talked about how amazing the day was. The kids loved it.

Here’s what they asked for:

It was cute. Wholesome, even. But I couldn’t help but feel… sad.

Because here’s the thing: these are 8-year-olds. They’re still full of imagination, wonder, and curiosity. Or they should be.

The premise of a Yes Day is to dream big—to imagine the most fun, most ridiculous, most exciting ideas and have an adult say “yes.” But these kids? They were asking for things that should already be part of school life: comfort, movement, freedom, joy.

None of it was truly wild. Nothing was too big. Everything stayed neatly within the lines.

That’s what hit me the hardest. It’s not that they didn’t want big things—it’s that they’ve already learned not to ask.

In so many schools, we chip away at children’s creativity, day by day. We condition them to be compliant. We reward the ones who color inside the lines and sit quietly on the rug. We tell them what’s appropriate, expected, allowed. And slowly, they forget how to be expansive. They forget how to imagine.

When a teacher says, “The sky’s the limit,” and the wildest thing a child can think to ask for is an extra snack? To sit in a different spot on the rug? That should make all of us pause.

It certainly made me pause.

It made me think of my own students—the ones who have learned to ask for more. Who’ve learned that their big, bold, silly, curious ideas will be taken seriously.

Human slingshot anyone?

I haven’t actually offered my students a Yes Day—because honestly, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t say yes to 90% of what they’d come up with.

Case in point: we were planning our end-of-year party and without any prompt, the first things they suggested were “a gigantic slip-and-slide” and “making lemonade from scratch.” No talk of Yes Days. No instructions to dream big. That is just how they think. And I can only imagine what they’d say if I actually took the guardrails off.

But that’s one of my favorite things about our conversations: they don’t limit themselves. They are wildly creative. Every day, they ask me things I’ve never been asked before in ten years of teaching. Yes Day requests from Fáilte kids? Guaranteed to be enormous. Imaginative. Messy. Ridiculous. Joyful. And often, totally unworkable—in the best possible way. That’s the difference when you give kids space to dream before the world teaches them not to.

At Fáilte, we say yes to childhood. Yes to the weird, wild ideas. Yes to kids taking up space. And yes to rebuilding what school can be.

Because a child’s dream shouldn’t stop bringing a snack from home.

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