We value community and collaboration. Our most important collaborators are the families that trust us to teach and care their children. Curriculum Night was an opportunity to invite families into our environment to immerse themselves in how we live and learn at Randolph. 

In the studio we are starting to create our masks for a favorite Randolph School tradition, Masquerade Parade! At the end of October, children and teachers will gather to share their handmade animal masks, make some music and listen to stories together. We'll parade up the driveway in all our splendor and rhythm! This year’s masks are inspired by each group’s animal name: The Ducklings, The Beetles, The Grasshoppers, The Honeybees, The Hummingbirds, and The Woodpeckers! Children are using reference photos to take inspiration from, they are looking closely at anatomical features of these animals with evan, and they are putting their own personal spin on their masks to make them unique. This process offers children a chance to solve problems, find inspiration from nature and friends, and celebrate their work together as a community!

Autumn is in the atmosphere, and our field scientists are busy working from the lab to take advantage of opportunities for observations and research that are literally falling from the sky. Work building towards harvest feast continues with trips to the front garden to uncover this year’s crop of intriguingly multicolored potatoes, while our recent experiments with concocting natural inks have informed new Back Field investigations into dyeing fabrics with organic potions made from foraged plants. But the diversity and splendor of fall leaves drifting to the ground as the angle of the sunbeams change and trees prepare to enter dormancy are the main focus of current scientific inquiry.

On Curriculum Night, many of you helped curate books for our new, outdoor library cart that lives on the library porch. The task was to choose a book--any book!--from our collection that spoke to some part of your identity. Then you could write a short note on a post-it telling us why you chose the book. Over the days since Curriculum Night, the children who have visited the cart have delighted in reading notes from their grown-ups and seeing the choices you made. By choosing books for this cart, you have provided entertainment and food for thought, invited us into your family histories and cultures, and deepened the connections between the children's school lives and home lives. You have inspired many children to check out books that they might not have otherwise. In the photos to the left, you can see a small sampling of the books chosen and some of the children enjoying them here at school. Thank you so much to all of who participated and for your thoughtful, educational, and inspiring messages!