Grandparents and Friends
Welcome to our newsletter!
There is a lot going on at Sunfield, and we’d like to share it with you! Starting in this issue, we will be highlighting classroom work and activities, class by class, to give you a better idea of the inner, and outer, workings of Sunfield’s Waldorf education, and the student experience. Ms. Curry’s class, our pioneer class, is the first to be featured. We hope you will enjoy getting to know them better.
Seventh/eighth grade explorations
Exploration could be viewed as a central theme of the curriculum of our seventh and eighth grade, well matched with the students’ own broadening interests.The class of eleven students, taught by Helen Curry, started their year studying the explorers of the Renaissance who radically changed the medieval view of our planet.
To deepen their experience, the students studied navigation and learned a variety of maritime skills, which culminated in an exciting overnight adventure exploring Hadlock Bay and Chimacum Creek aboard the rowing dories of the Community Boat Program. The class continues their partnership with this program by visiting the Community Boatshop weekly, where they learn a variety of new skills – sharpening tools, woodcarving, lathe turning – as they help build a rowing dory like the ones they used.
In their main lessons, the students study the biographies and works of the remarkable individuals that define the Renaissance, touching on a broad range of subjects. In astronomy, they learn about Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, and Galileo – courageous astronomers who proposed the revolutionary concept of a heliocentric universe. In physical science and anatomy, they hear about the scientists that dared to seek more knowledge, opening the doors to today's understandingsThis insatiable curiosity in the workings of the world, this questioning that is so integral to the Renaissance mind, are the same impulses that are blooming in the adolescent students of this grade. The Waldorf curriculum, based on a deep understanding of human development, is designed to meet the students’ own quest for learning.
Images of the great works of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci decorate the walls of the classroom, alongside the students’ own artistic work in sketches and woodcuts.
Immersed in the arts of the Renaissance they may start the morning with archery, using long bows they helped to shape, or a song in three part harmony, dating back to the Spanish Renaissance. On another morning a recorder quartet plays a Branle or Pavane, from the French Renaissance tradition, adding the unusual sound of a krumhorn and bowed psaltery, to accompany the others of the class as they learn the graceful dances of the period.The students not only experience a rounded study of the Renaissance, but are encouraged to broaden their own thinking and learning in the manner of the great thinkers of this time – to develop a balance between science and art, logic and imagination.
New concepts in mathematics are introduced, in algebra, and three dimensional geometry, focusing on the formulas of the Platonic Solids. In Chemistry and Physical Science students are asked to observe and carefully record the results of experiments, deriving their own conclusions to scientific theories.
“Everything is connected to everything else,” stated Leonardo da Vinci, and the students are encouraged to recognize this interconnectedness, or Connesssione, one of the major principles of Renaissance thinking. These principles and their explanations are pinned by the blackboard. They include Dimostrazione: a commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes; and Curiosita: an insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.Rowing
For days we saw the students of the seventh and eighth grade out in the schoolyard in the mornings, all lined up in a double row of blue plastic chairs, with a rope outlining the rough shape of a boat around them. Holding brooms out to the side as if oars, they paddled their brooms across the waving grass.At first, they just looked like brooms waving about in some mysterious game, but then they began to take a more definite shape, moving in unison in graceful arcs, and the schoolyard became a sea to us as well as to the class.
Classroom Expansion
The classrooms of Sunfield Waldorf School are bustling with a total of one hundred students! Next school year there will be two kindergarten classes and five grade school classes, including a graduating class of eight and ninth graders. Several of the classrooms are now small for classes with more than twenty students. Creating more classroom space, a community meeting area, and bathrooms for students as well as the visiting schools in our farm education programs has become a necessity.
As we celebrate our first class graduating from eighth grade, we hope also to celebrate the creation of the first building to be constructed by us on Sunfield Land for Learning, a reflection of our philosophy and commitment. We look on this building as a sure sign of “taking root” and securing a strong foundation for our future growth.
For the past year volunteers have been preparing for this building’s capital campaign, ensuring that the organization has a binding site plan for future development, and working with faculty and staff to define design elements for a multi-purpose building that will be able to house two classes, and reconfigure into a hall by shifting a central wall. A bit over $8,000 has been raised to date, for the creation of design drawings, and $22,000 more is required to create the plans for county approval. We encourage you to help us in this first step of our $500,000 campaign so that by September 2013 we will have a building that will allow us to accommodate our growing number of students, strengthen our community education programs, and secure our foundation for future growth, and become a living symbol of Sunfield’s commitment to Land for Learning.
Jake Meyer
Organizational Director
jmeyer@sunfieldfarm.org
www.sunfieldfarm.org