11/07/2021
Students were *thrilled* to get up close and personal with pumpkins last week!
Usually around the holidays, pumpkins involve adult-led agendas: carving them into picture worthy faces, baking them, or decorating with them.
At school, students were given one objective: explore!
Students used hammers, screwdrivers, and a wide variety of other tools to dig deeper into pumpkins. Big messes were absolutely invited in!
On day one, we witnessed skin being peeled, holes carved out, golf tees hammered in, and a bit of guts removed. So many wonderful questions and discoveries arose naturally, which led to deeper learning. Many vocabulary words were organically brought in to student conversations as they tinkered with their freedom.
Day two, however, was where the magic really happened. One student had been waiting patiently to “destroy” a pumpkin with the hammer. He was promised that he could, as long as he waited until everyone had been given sufficient time to explore the intact pumpkins. This came during our time for free art exploration.
How many times do we stop our children from being destructive, just for the sake of it? Of course it makes sense in most scenarios, but giving children the outlet to make messes, destroy, and take apart is a wonderful thing.
This student went absolutely nuts on his pumpkin - guts flew everywhere, large pieces of it were slammed onto the table, and so many holes came to this poor pumpkin. There was so much joy, but also intense focus, on this child’s face. He worked on his pumpkin, breathing heavily, for quite some time.
And then, when I thought he would walk away from what he had conquered, he switched to creativity. The pieces of the pumpkin began getting hammered together as he thought up a new purpose - the many layers of pumpkin became sandwiches and burgers! He used other pieces, nailed together, to plug up the holes in other pumpkins.
When given the opportunity and time to follow his own process, what could have been viewed as mindless destruction ended up being a purposeful agenda. He walked away from that station feeling proud, successful, and satisfied.
And, he happily helped clean up the insane amount of pumpkin bits at clean up time. 🧡
We of course fit some traditional pumpkin learning in with our year-long experiment on “Pumpkin Jack”, and covered other typical academic aspects of fun fall topics.
We learn to read, write, and do math every day.
But at our core, our goal here is to build confident, fulfilled little humans, who are ready to give back to their world as their best selves.
We still have a couple of spots open for the 2021-2022 school year - contact us to see how your child can be a part of our school family!
