Cooling Down and Heating Up with the BEAM Team

In (and out of) the Studio with Nina

In the studio, we’ve been continuing our work around the elements of art and who we all are as artists. We’re using the lens of the elements of art to further dig down into which art-making feels good to us, what we’re excited to try and what feels challenging to us. We’ve explored line and color through drawing, painting, and printmaking. After working with lines for 2 sessions, we built upon our line work by exploring the next element and what happens when lines meet up- shape!

The Sunnies learned about geometric shapes through collage, inspired by the shape-centric paintings of Paul Klee, while also exploring shape through mosaic blocks and the book The Shape of Things. When looking at Castle and Sun by Klee, without knowing the title, the Sunnies noticed that it looks like a block building, a castle, the sun or moon, and a big city! These ideas and this painting inspired their own shape collages.

The Flower Patch Kids created glowing geometric shapes using chalk pastels and black paper. They also thought about what images and scenes you can make through just using geometric shapes or the combination of geometric and organic shapes. Through this, they created collages inspired by the art of Sonia Delaurney and Paul Klee, some looking similar to Klee's blocky, cubist paintings and some more inspired by Delaurney's circular and organic work.

The Carriage House discussed the difference between geometric and organic shapes and created organic shape mixed media art inspired by illustrator Felicita Sala and her illustrations in When You Find the Right Rock. They used crayon, sharpie and watercolor paints to create an array of organic stone shapes. To their rocks, they added texture, some surprising elements hiding in plain sight, and an array of colors to create a spread of special rocks we’d be really excited to see in the wild!

Back in the Stacks with Siobhan

The Randolph School Library is organized according to the Metis Classification System, which was created by librarians at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. Their intention in creating the system was to remove barriers between a child and a book they want or need to find. Rather than using long numbers like the Dewey Decimal System, the Metis System uses letters and whole language and is adaptable to any library.

This works for the Randolph library in two major ways. First, a letter and a word are easier to remember than a long number with a decimal point. If you were looking for a book about maple trees, in the Metis System the call number is D. TREES. In Dewey, the call number is something like 582.16. Using the Metis call number, I can label the bin that all the tree books are in with a whole word (“Trees”) and the whole section with a letter (“D”), both of which give you information about that section that you could not glean by looking at the number 582.16.

Second, using letters and whole language instead of numbers also makes browsing the library a literacy activity. I can sing the ABC song with a group of Downstairs or Upstairs Neighborhood kids and we can point out each section as we sing. By the time we get to the end of the song, they have identified every section of the library.

If they ask me for books about dragons, I can tell them to look for the “T” section. As they search the signs for a “T”, they are engaging in pre-reading skills. There are directional signs, section heading signs, and a “T” label on every bin in the section, so finding the T’s should be accessible for all kids here, no matter their age or reading level.

The Metis System prioritizes the comprehension skills and browsing habits of children, making it a perfect fit for Randolph. As the creators of the system said, “Children want to read about all kinds of things; we’re getting out of their way!”

Notes From the Field with evan

Food Preparation is a Grind!

First the wait, then the daily grind! A few short weeks ago we reflected upon the wait between the hopeful and ambitious work of spring planting and the joy of fall harvest. The wait is over, the harvest is in, and now it’s time for the grind, literally. The plentiful and vibrantly colored heirloom dent corn we gathered from the Three Sisters Garden in the first days of September is now dried and ready to grind into fresh flour for autumn recipe testing and Harvest Feast. As we follow the essential themes of garden and harvest that carry us from spring through summer and into fall we inevitably arrive at intersections with linked cornerstones in our curriculum like dormancy and Indigenous culture.

Handling and preparing this ancient variety of corn encourages us to revisit and reinforce past learning about the Wappinger people and launch new investigations about the history of native peoples adapting their practices and technology to life in this environment. Solving the practical problem of grinding the hardened corn kernels into a more readily usable flour begins with the satisfying sensory experience of peeling kernels off of the cobs. Children of all ages readily apply their fingers and thumbs, the earliest tools gifted to all humans through their shared ancestry and evolutionary history, happily joining in the communal work of nourishing ourselves.

The next step of crushing the separated kernels into fine flour is not so easily accomplished and requires ingenuity beyond our basic physical capacities. Luckily, kids playing and learning in the Randolph environment all have ample experience to draw upon from their own experiments attempting to grind bricks, chalk, walnuts and other natural objects. The ensuing process invites us to take a journey through time, from the paleolithic age, when stone tools were the most advanced solutions to physical challenges, through the ages of invention and industrialization to the modern day where metal milling devices comprised of simple machines combined together enable us to use a little of our own strength to efficiently transform corn into flower. In doing so we add enduring lessons about technology and engineering to our Links menu of biology and food science as we take apart and reassemble our own grain mills, learning the technical terms for each part and closely observing their structures and how they function.

Plants Make Pigments

As busy as we have been in and out of the farm and studying STEM concepts and the anatomy of corn kernels, we have made time for brewing a number of natural inks and dyes from the readily available natural materials around us that can be foraged in the fall, including pokeberry, buckthorn, garden marigolds and more. This endeavor compliments our other food science and botany studies and adds a rich infusion of chemistry to the mix. How does crushing walnuts or berries change the way they blend with water and release pigment? What about adding salt or an acid like vinegar to the solution? How does the energy of fire transfer into a pot of water and acorn caps? What is this result when this mixture is boiled? All of these questions and experiments yield new understandings about physical properties and chemical processes. They also result in a collection of beautiful inks we can use to express our ideas and inspiration creatively and artistically. From farm to flowers, from maize to marigolds, a child-centered and nature-inspired approach leads us to limitless opportunities to nourish our sense of wonder with experiences spanning natural and human history and linking science, history and art. And all of this from just one step on the journey that leads to stone soup…

Page updated

Report abuse