Carriage House

March 24, 2023

Barn Owls

Each year, Randolph students look forward to winter and the exciting maple sugaring experiences that come with it! This maple fest marked a period of tremendous personal growth for the Barn Owls, in which the words “thought, effort, time, and revision” became a mantra that they took to heart and put into practice.

Our preparation for this event began in December, when we wassailed our trees at Winter celebration and helped them to drift off into Dormancy. Around this time, the Barn Owls were given a choice between four maple themed projects connected to different areas on our roadmap: creative writing, data collection and graphing, nature journaling, and graphic noveling. Once 4 groups were formed around each project, they received a rubric, a project checklist, and other forms designed to help them self assess, track their own progress, engage in research and learn to give and receive feedback. As these projects progressed, the Barn Owls became increasingly independent, to a point where they would arrive in the morning, take out their projects and begin working with a sense of calm, joyful productivity.

Alongside their maple projects, we collected weather data for the Randolph sugaring season and learned to show trends in temperature using line graphs. A master copy of the data table and line graph was created as a whole class, while each individual was also responsible for updating their own table and plotting their own graph. This was challenging, technical work that required lots of communication within the groups. Included in these efforts were many class discussions about the purpose of data collection in this specific context, as well as the different functions of tables and graphs.

With a week left before Maple Fest, the Barn Owls put their heads together and planned and painted a maple tree mural that beautifully crystallized their shared knowledge and experience gained here at Randolph. On chart paper, we posed the question “How do we make a maple tree mural?” Then, The Barn Owls all contributed to a “web” of ideas and next steps which were followed by a frenzy of organized creative action! The completed mural would not have been possible without the efforts and ideas of the entire class, and they couldn’t be more proud of their achievement!

Elder Guardians

The Unfolding of Inquiry

As we say at Randolph, living and learning are independent conditions. One way of making that link tangible to students is through the process of guided and independent inquiry. These frameworks allow us to approach learning through an interdisciplinary lens, meet children where they currently are, and provide both support and challenge as they work towards deeper learning. Beginning in the Downstairs, students are immersed in experiences of inquiry, starting with skills that come naturally to 3 and 4 year olds: asking questions, formulating hypotheses, collecting information, and building onto already acquired knowledge. From there, the new information is distilled, evaluated, synthesized, and applied, while at the same time, becoming the seeds of further inquiry. The process can be never-ending, if we allow it to be. As students get older, they use the background knowledge and skills developed in earlier years to further deepen and expand the process.

For the past month we’ve been in the beginning stages of our next inquiry: an exploration of space and what it takes to support human life. But we didn’t start there! Read on to see how your students' questions, interests, and background knowledge have been molding our latest pursuits, even from the very beginning.

Inquiry Focus: Take One

After hearing students comment on the extreme temperatures and lack of snow over the winter, we began our inquiry by looking at artifacts related to climate change.

Students were shocked to find out that in the 19th Century, the Hudson used to freeze so thoroughly that people could walk from Beacon to Newburgh. They also discovered that there used to be a booming ice trade, something that seems impossible today. After experiencing the slushy and icy conditions at Catamount this season, they had lived experience connected to the data that shows that ski seasons are shrinking.

But when we gathered together to discuss what we knew and wondered about climate change, student interest pivoted. They started having a dynamic conversation about what it would take to sustain life outside of Earth. Is it possible for humans to live somewhere else? What are the chances there is or has been life outside of Earth? (read: besides tardigrades, which I have since learned a lot about). As educators, we see the connections between what kids were presented with and the questions they were most interested in asking. And we plan to get back to those. However, we also see the value in shifting towards where students are showing us their interest and schema lies. So, we put our climate exploration on hold (for now; again, there are deep connections) and started exploring what it takes to sustain human life.

Inquiry Focus: Take Two

We started by charting everything students think they know about space. This is an important first step and allows us to begin to understand where students are with their knowledge about a subject.

Then, students came up with questions. This gives us another opportunity to get a glimpse into what level of challenge students are ready for as we craft learning experiences. It also lets me learn more about each kid and their unique interests.

Some of these questions may be things students decide to explore during the independent research stage of the process. Or, students may become more interested in something else. Time will tell!

The last way that we activated background knowledge was through reading a common text. Common texts allow students to begin an inquiry with similar information about the topic. This supports them in the next phase of the process, which is question formation.

The question formation phase is where students form the guiding questions of the inquiry. Students were given a “question focus” and asked to come up with as many related questions as they could. After brainstorming, students went back and checked their work, identifying questions that did not actually have to do with the prompt. This process involved independent and partner work, as well as group discussion. We practiced supporting our claim with evidence and revising a question to make it a better fit.

After narrowing down our questions, we prioritized them. We first explored the difference between closed and open questions. Then, students revised the closed questions to make them ones that could sustain research. Eventually, we landed on two questions:

1. What would it take for a planet or moon other than Earth to support life?

2. What technology could scientists and astronauts use to find out if there are other planets or moons that could host life?

At the same time that they’ve been developing our guiding questions, students have also been exploring ancient civilizations that have contributed to our knowledge of astronomy. One morning as students came in, they answered the question, “How do we know what we know about space?”

Then, we watched a video about the contributions of Islamic, Babalonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, and Indian scholars. Our exploration of identity last fall planted the seeds for discussing why certain people are usually left out of this discourse around the foundations of astronomy. We will continue learning about ancient societies that studied the stars throughout the inquiry.

Now that we have finished forming our guiding questions, we’re moving into the research phase. Today, we practiced taking notes from a video called “The Maya and the Sun” which connected to the recent vernal equinox and added another important group to our list of people who have studied the stars. Now, students are ready to explore resources independently as we attempt to answer our three questions.