A new approach to middle and high school education. www.starsplitteracademy.com What do you remember of your middle and high school education?
Our Story
The Star-Splitter cohort arose in response to the pandemic, as a way to serve Covid-conscious members of the Northfield community. We threw out our preconceived notions of what a school should look like, and focused on what actually worked best for students, individually and as a group. At an age when it is most important to be mentored through the difficulties of adolescence, many teen
06/20/2023
The graduates, arriving to the ceremony from the forest of the unknown, with the friends/classmates they met along the way (who are playing/singing Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" to the tune of "The Star of the County Down," complete with kazoos!).
06/14/2023
In May, we held our Call To Adventure graduation ceremony, in which our seniors, Henry Bench, Finnegan Frock, and Lydia Jensen, marked the completion of part of their educational hero’s journeys: they had been called to adventure, entered the unknown, gained life-affirming knowledge, and brought it back with them at journey’s end.
One journey’s end is another’s beginning. In order to prepare them for their next hero’s journey beyond The Star-Splitter Academy, their classmates presented each graduate with small, meaningful gifts to pack in their bindles (a practice we derived from our study of folktales and fairy tales).
The ceremony also featured Sanda Moore Coleman, who gave a talk on the power of saying “yes and,” and Anna Christensen, who had led the Star-Splitters in a master class on jazz vocal improvisation earlier in the year, singing “Pomp and Circumstance” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street” a ca****la.
06/10/2023
A link to Fish-Scale and Star, the literary and arts journal / yearbook of The Star-Splitter Academy 2022-2023 created by Madi Coleman
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PT3ae9cSCWzf0Fhp4Y0ZZHdeHOHpWYZH/view?usp=share_link
In February, we held The Star-Splitter Salon, where luminaries such as Dr. James Herriot, Shirley Jackson, Oscar Wilde, John Steinbeck, Rebecca Stead, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Ellen Raskin met to present their latest works in manuscript form.
Each eminent author wrote seven- to ten-page essays discussing character and theme, and how their new work intersects with what the Star-Splitters had learned earlier in the year, including the story circle, filmic techniques, and figures of speech. The authors presented their works via Google slides presentations, then answered questions from their fellow authors.
06/01/2023
EDIT: CHANGE OF DATE (Workshop now July 10-21)
Join us in July for a two-week, hands-on workshop in filmmaking!
Meet your instructors:
Madi Coleman is a senior at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, who has been part of award-winning filmmaking teams that have had their work featured at the Top Ten Showcase at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the Tallgrass Film Festival. Earlier this year, she taught a student-favorite filmmaking class at The Star-Splitter Academy, The Writers' Room.
William Coleman is the co-founder of The Star-Splitter Academy and the proud father of Madi Coleman.
During the last week of school, the Star-Splitters wrote and performed original radio dramas that integrated their knowledge of old time radio programs, neuroscience, Shakespeare, foley artistry, and other aspects of what we learned this year.
Here are excepts from the drama written and performed by Lydia, Oliver, Finn, Tori, and Chessie: "Snakes on a Zeppelin!"
05/28/2023
The Star-Splitter Academy at the 34th Annual Kansas Voices Reception and Awards Ceremony
Congratulations to Star-Splitters Oliver, Lydia, Hadley, and Chessie, who together won six of the eight youth division prizes in poetry and prose, including first place in each division. The competition received nearly four hundred entries from throughout the state.
05/20/2023
As part of the Star-Splitter Call to Adventure/Graduation ceremony last night, Madi Coleman, who taught the filmmaking deep-dive this year, presented her gift to the graduates in the form of this video, in which the Star-Splitter community talks about what they love about each senior.
Congratulations, Star-Splitter Academy Class of 2023! As part of the Star-Splitter Call to Adventure/Graduation ceremony last night, Madi Coleman, who taught the filmmaking deep-dive this year, presented her gif...
05/17/2023
Today The Star-Splitters performed original radio dramas that integrated their knowledge of old time radio programs, neuroscience, Shakespeare, foley artistry, and other aspects of what we learned this year.
(more photos--and video--to come!
05/14/2023
On Friday, we celebrated the outstanding work of Henry and Lydia, who formally presented their year-long senior projects to the Star-Splitter Community.
(During the open-house portion of the afternoon, other Star-Splitters also displayed projects they had made at the end of particular deep dives.)
Henry's project, a 1/12th scale model of our school house, has walls that open to reveal his understanding of a host of deep dives, including filmic techniques, Macbeth, Beowulf, tort law, and more.
Lydia's project is an original graphic novel composed of five thematically linked pieces inspired by our studies of comedy, folklore, film, neurology, American history, the science of sound, literature, rhetoric, and drama.
Today in Sound Science, we studied the Doppler effect. Henry immediately created a visual model of the phenomenon!