What Autumn Has to Offer
November 7, 2025
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In (and out of) the Studio with Nina
In (and out of) the Studio with Nina
In the studio we've been creating with our hands! Between our ceramic work that will go into the kiln this week, and the beginnings of an embroidery project, we've been building our fine motor skill and exploring the way our hands and muscles impact the work we’re creating!
The Sunnies have been making pinch pots that will become our candle holders for the upcoming Harvest Feast, a much loved Randolph tradition for children at the end of November. Inspired by their work preserving leaves with beeswax, we’ll be filling their pinch pots with beeswax and wicks after it’s glazed and fired in the kiln.
We’ll also be using lots of the embroidery we’re working on now as decorations for Harvest Feast, turning their beautiful hard work into bunting to decorate our outdoor dining room! The Sunnies have been using yarn, burlap and plastic needles for their embroidery practice, along with lacing cards to help solidify the up-down-up-down pattern of the needle.
The Neighborhood has been making their houses out of clay as part of their overarching mapping project they’ve been working on together with their classroom teachers. They spent time drawing their homes and really thinking about what makes their houses special to them, from trees to trampolines, to special decorations! Their embroidery work has started in a similar fashion to the Sunnies, using yarn and burlap, with plastic needles as they get the hang of things. Next week they’ll have the option to continue working with those materials or to move on the cotton and embroidery thread.
The Carriage House kids have been using their ceramics project as an open ended creative session- building and sculpting something that feels important to them! In addition, the focus of their embroidery work has been on mastering all the steps of embroidery on their own- from threading a needle (which is SO hard, but so far everyone has been able to even if it’s taken several tries!) to tying a finishing knot on the back of their work. We’ve been cheering every time someone threads a needle for the first time!
In addition to all the work we've been doing in the studio, I'd love to invite you to visit our new Virtual Gallery! Here, you'll find a few examples of projects from each age group. Right now, each child has their mask and some of their line art from our Elements of Art series up in the galleries. I'll be updating the gallery periodically with new work, so make sure to check back!
Back in the Stacks with Siobhan
Back in the Stacks with Siobhan
From the beginning of the year until now, we have been spending our library time working on finding “just right” books. We start this work with group discussions in which we try to answer a seemingly straightforward question: How do you know a book is just right for you?
Answers to this question range widely based on age, reading level, knowledge of the library system, personality, learning preferences, and many other factors. Maybe a book is just right for you because it only has a couple of words in it that you weren’t already familiar with. Maybe a book is just right because it has lots of words in it that you didn’t already know. Probably it is about a subject that you find interesting or it is written in a style or genre that you enjoy. Maybe the illustrations draw you in. Maybe you don’t know why it’s just right; you just know that you can’t stop reading it.
With this question in mind, the kids browse the collection, searching for their “just right” books. In order to support this, we do activities to help them learn how to find books within the library collection; we ask lots of questions about what they already like or what seems interesting to them; we ask friends for recommendations, knowing that we might have different tastes from them; we take stacks of books to the green rug or the comfy chairs so they can look through them and see if anything catches their attention.
The most important thing for each child to remember is that they are following their own reading bliss. They are looking inward, investigating what they truly love, and listening when their instinct or their lack of enthusiasm tells them a book is not “just right” for them. In this way, they can start to establish their identities as curious readers that confidently choose books that will light them up. Hopefully, the more they practice finding books that are just right, the more and the longer they will read–far into the future.
Notes From the Field With evan
Notes From the Field With evan
Playing with Science
Playing with Science
From chemistry to play-acting to skeletons, oh my! In a few short weeks we have leaped from science to the arts and back again with a variety of experiences and investigations linked to our farm and fall harvest and drawing inspiration from Mask Parade, the Skeletons performance, and Halloween spookiness. Our commitment to nourishing our minds on the rich curricular fruits of many months of cooperative labor in the garden before turning to the business of cooking and feasting has proven once again to be an exciting way to live and learn together and a compelling way to honor the indigenous culture of innovating ways to make every possible use of a plant or animal that is harvested for food.
Chemical Reactions
Chemical Reactions
In the season of witches and magic potions, our experiments in the realm of making inks and dyes feels right at home. Actually, this is just a natural extension of the intuitive scientific inquiry children with access to any stimulating environment undertake, as illustrated by the concoctions the Downstairs Sunnies are mixing up with rain water and branch pestles amidst the falling maple leaves on recent afternoons. This deep into autumn, all students are familiar with the basic method of amassing a pigment-rich resource like black walnuts, putting them in a pot with lots of water and a dash of salt and vinegar, boiling them over the fire while occasionally stirring and mashing, and then filtering out the resulting liquid to use for writing and painting. That sounds like an experiment, or a recipe, because it is! The links to cooking and empirical science are self-evident, but children eager to depict the actual plants with the pigments that they yielded quickly identified the absence of a green ink amidst the beautiful earth tones, warm yellows and oranges and deep purples, even though green is the color we most consistently observe in association with plants. We couldn’t help but wonder how to make a green ink from our environment, and having a burning question about the natural world around us based on our own observations has always been the starting point of authentic scientific inquiry. The next step is usually some background research, and consulting the book Make Ink by Jason Logan confirmed that there is indeed a way to produce a green hue from the berries of a buckthorn bush, something we had already collected on campus and processed into a thin, purplish liquid.
The process is a little more nuanced than the basic recipe we have already used to make other inks, inviting us to delve a more deeply into the realm of practical chemistry and laboratory science. We discussed laboratory terminology and safety, donning gloves and goggles and learning to name and handle beakers, graduated cylinders and pipettes. We touched upon the basics of metric measurements and chemical compounds, and then methodically prepared a sodium hydroxide solution by dissolving lye crystals in water. Adding one drop at a time to a precisely measured volume of buckthorn juice, we slowly but surely rendered a seemingly magical chemical change and marvelled as the purple liquid became a vibrant green. Universal indicator strips for testing pH illuminated the inferences we made from visually analyzing our results and led to new questions about how altering the chemical composition of other inks and mixtures might affect them. We enjoyed the full circle of scientific inquiry from observation to experimentation to identifying new questions for further research and since then chemistry has been showing up everywhere. Ask your kids what we are uncovering about food science in the coming weeks.
Ecological Drama
Ecological Drama
Gathering along the log in the Upper Playground that is consistently used as a rehearsal space for the Skeletons and other campus performers we took the time to enjoy transformations less chemical and more personal and playful in nature. The work and intention each child poured into creating their mask for Mask Parade and the powerful links between these masks and the plants and animals around us had them brimming with excitement and primed for storytelling. We started by carefully considering and attempting to reenact one of the oldest known Three Sisters stories, the Haudenosaunee tale of the origins of corn, beans and squash. We then collaborated in small groups to tell fresh-baked, new stories about the ways creek dragons, corn spirits, potato personages and forest creatures might interact. In the same way we consulted the steps in the scientific method before our buckthorn experiment, we brainstormed what we knew about the basic components of story-telling such as setting, characters and conflict. Defining and discussing these concepts helped us communicate effectively and negotiate productively while we generated the opening acts of scripts about these characters and then rehearsed and workshopped them. All agreed that the initial results were interesting, evocative, and worthy of further development. We look forward to finding ways to keep pulling this thread in the coming weeks and prepare some kind of performance for Harvest Feast this year. What’s old is new and what’s new is old in this harvest season at Randolph and the linking approach that allows us to weave art, music and science together is proving to be as fruitful as ever.
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