Cold Weather Inspiration

BEAM Tm: February 14, 2025

In (and out of) the Studio with Nina

In the studio we’ve been finishing up our January projects and starting to tap into maple sugaring inspired art making for February!

Inspired by the animal tracks we’ve been seeing in the snow on the lower playground, the Ducklings explored making tracks using plastic animals, black paint and white paper. Some of the animals were “going way down south” and some were fighting in the snow, while others were falling and sliding to make long slippy tracks. This was a fun way to continue exploring something exciting they saw on the playground in a new way.

In addition to their animal prints they’ve been drip dropping paint using squeeze bottles to make abstract paintings inspired by the sound of sap dripping in metal sap buckets all around Randolph school. This work helps them visualize that dripping sound while also helping strengthen those hand muscles as they start or continue to work on their early writing skills.

In the Upstairs Neighborhood, we’ve been blending our Alexander Calder balance sculptures with the maple trees we see around us, as they continue making “mobiles” and “stabiles” inspired by Calder’s work and expanding on that exploration to look at the world around us. During ski season we focus on balance in the studio and as we move into maple season, we were able to continue this work while looking through a different lens and focusing on the natural world.

They’ve been using wire, clay and wooden skewers with corrugated cardboard and pipe cleaners to create both abstract, sometimes tricky to balance, creations and beautiful sugar maple trees complete with birds nests and sap buckets.

The Carriage House has finished up their intricate symmetrical paper mosaics, and started exploring different artists and media through the lens of maple sugaring. They “met” artist, Maud Lewis, a mid 20th century Canadian self taught artist. They looked at her winter paintings, which include maple sugaring scenes, ski slopes, and wintery school houses. They spent time looking closely at some of her paintings and seeing what they noticed that felt specific to her style of art. They noticed her color palette (mostly primary colors, plus white and green), her blocky way of painting people, the depth in her backgrounds, and the way she fully filled her painting surface.

After being introduced to her art, they set about making their own maple paintings, inspired by Maud Lewis’ style, colors, and subject matter. Their paintings show maple sugaring scenes here at Randolph or as they imagine them in the past, as well as ski slopes inspired by their own ski experiences from the past month and beyond.

Coming up next in the studio is printmaking with the Upstairs Neighborhood and Carriage House, collage with the Ducklings, and Maple-inspired ceramics for everyone!

Back in the Stacks with Siobhan

As the trees are slowly waking up from dormancy and the very first signs of spring are peeking up through the snow, in the library we are doing another kind of awakening and peeking through.

In our library, the S. section is the Picture Stories section. Within this section, there are three subcategories: Authors and Illustrators, Characters, and Genres.

This week, all the Upstairs groups have been engaging in a media literacy lesson that entails looking at pictures of all the authors and illustrators included in that section. (See a small sampling of the photos below.) As we flipped through the pictures, the children were invited to do some noticing about the authors.

Jon Klassen
Carson Ellis/Candlewick Press

Adam Rubin
Wikipedia / Fuzheado

Margaret Wise Brown
littlegoldenbooks.fandom.com

They noticed that some of them have beards. They noticed that some of them wear glasses. They noticed that one of the photos is in black and white. They noticed that most of them are smiling. They noticed that many of the people in the photos appear to have light skin, but some of them look like they have darker skin. They discovered that you can’t tell just by looking at someone how they might identify in terms of race and gender.

In the end, we discussed the fact that every author/illustrator in the S. Authors and Illustrators section identifies(ed) as White. When asked why that’s a problem, one of the responses was, “Because there aren’t only White people in the world.”

The final question was, “What should we do about this problem?” Several children offered to donate books they have at home. The Hummingbirds decided we should go through the books we have there now and make space for different authors. (Bonus: we get to read lots of great books in order to do that! Some of them got started already.) We will keep brainstorming answers and digging through other sections in our library throughout the spring, so stay tuned!

Musical Storytelling with Michael

Ducklings

This week we began learning some of the songs we will be singing at Maple Fest. These songs are fun and instructional; as they help us to better understand the process and the steps along the way to making our very own maple syrup at The Randolph School. These songs have the additional layer of movement sequences, that we make up organically and collaboratively, then helping the songs become more kinesthetically embodied.

We also started linking to all the beautiful arts and crafts, as well as the building of structures, that occur daily with the Ducklings.

We broke down the basics of song construction, using Lincoln Logs, tiny maple buckets, and blocks to organize the songs into verse, chorus and bridge. They really got it! There are many intuitive aspects to music, that can be hard to articulate and teach, but there are also simple ways to construct songs that are not unlike constructing a lego house.

Upstairs and Carriage House

We focused this week on the snow.

How it contains many layers of sound in part, because it simultaneously creates its own acoustic environment. That landscape is water transformed. Water considerably better than air for conducting sound, and brings out the frequency and tension of other great conductors such as steel and iron.

So when you pay attention to how many scrapes the snow plow makes, whilst you are comfy in your bed at night, and how that number corresponds to your elation and delight that there may be a snow day, you are creating a story in your mind. These stories tend to have a lot of air around them. Space you can then populate with images and sound.

We learned the word, "Snirt" which is snow and dirt. And that snow has crust, which is familiar and easy to access. What is the sound of snirty snow or crusty snow or what kinda words can we come up with after a trundle around the campus.

"Snurfle" said Norah

"Clickett" whispered Chloe

"Dinknabbit" exclaimed Walter

Those are good enough for me.

Notes from the Field with evan

Tracking and tunneling, sledding and sculpting! Once we have tapped trees we are closely attuned to the daily and hourly shifts in the weather and the environment that mark this transitional time of year. Each time we gather for BEAM we begin with the question: does it feel more wintery or springy right now? This week we experienced a clear shift back towards the wintery side of things, and while the sap flow slowed and the half-filled buckets froze, we pivoted to the many delights of playing and exploring in a winter landscape. We began experimenting with a newly acquired infrared heat sensor, revealing subtle and otherwise invisible differences in the surface temperatures of ice and snow, sunny and shady spots, and even on different sides of the sugar maple trunks.

The fresh snow also gave us the opportunity to follow animal tracks all around campus and down to the creek, observing hard evidence of the incredible diversity of creatures present and active around our school and uncovering the fascinating stories of just what animals are up to in the frozen landscape. We followed birds, mice, weasels, raccoons and foxes to and from our bird feeders and garbage cans and across the playgrounds. We paused to watch a pileated wood-pecker excavating grubs from a cedar and to admire a bald eagle wheeling overhead. We tracked coyotes through the woods where the snow revealed how they forage, dig up mouse nests they smell under the snow, where they go to the creek to drink, and how they use urine and scat to mark their territory. Being able to walk in the footsteps of these wild neighbors and visualize their habits and survival behaviors is a true gift of winter.

Exploring animal tracks at Hunter Creek

Students construct a system of snow tunnels

The sequence of significant snowfall, days creeping above the melting point, and hard overnight freezes is also the perfect recipe for snow art and engineering. The first priority was bolstering the sledding hill, cooperating in the mission of “strategic snow redeployment” to make sure the launching areas at the top of the hill and the infamous divots and icy patches were built up from day one. The results were a fast, safe, and sustainable set of sledding lanes that lasted throughout the week, providing hours of high-speed thrills and “penguin sliding” as the groups of all ages came together time and again to celebrate our sensational slope. In the same spirit of collaborative effort, students took turns working with the huge furroughs of snow made by the plow to carve out an extensive network of snow caves and tunnels.

Once again, the nature of the BEAM schedule allowed for all from the youngest Ducklings to the oldest Woodpeckers to make significant contributions and share in the enjoyment of this colossal engineering project. On a smaller scale, kids transformed the amphitheater into a snow sculpture gallery, working with hands, sticks, and shovels to build up and carve the slushy snow into human figures, castles, giant serpents, and a functional life-sized snow bed. Art and engineering, science and imaginative play don’t get any more nature-based than this.

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