The Flow of Activity

Dear Friends-

Here are some things I have noticed at Randolph School recently:

There are pails collecting sap from the maple trees, and children have been gathering around to watch ants bloated with the sweet liquid stagger over the rim and safely home. Evan’s sweatshirt has been infused with the thick smoky smell of the fire he has been tending at the evaporator with the kids. Down by the amphitheater, Anita and Beth’s students have been working with architect Chris Berg to stake out an outline in bright string of where the new arts and library building will be constructed. The Upstairs block room has been packed with incredible student displays for our annual 100th Day of School Museum. One student collected one hundred mice skulls from an owl inhabited barn. There were other displays of one hundred hand drawn hearts, and two separate collections of one hundred trees. Mike’s students have been using the calligraphy skills they learned with Alice to write fictional letters from the civil war era. Downstairs students have been making tiny fairy houses in wood shop that are to be collected into a village when finished. When I walked into the Great Room the other day, five pre-K children were busy painting a huge swath of butcher paper in blue, green, and purple. They told me it was water, seaweed, and coral, and that they were shifting the room from an Arctic habitat into an Ocean habitat.

There have been groups of dedicated and hard-working parents collected at the kitchen table to plan and organize Maplefest, as they have been for the last several months. A nearby farm has offered to donate hay bales as seating for the event, and the parent of an alumni stopped by the office the other day to drop off six dozen eggs from his hens to be used for the pancake breakfast. There have been kaffeeklatsches, led by parents and trustees, that have been meeting regularly at the same kitchen table to talk about the fantastic work being done on The Studios building project. This Friday, adults gathered on the porch to carpool kids to the DIA Museum in Beacon for a late morning tour.

It’s hard not to notice that throughout all this activity, when we look outside there is no snow this year. Our sense of season has been dramatically shifted. The hay bales at the bottom of our unused sledding run have been brought up to cover the muddy grass of the upper playground. In the face of these disrupted weather patterns, it is nice to know that the rhythms of Randolph School continue and that the flow of engaged learning, exploration, play, and communal interaction remains unchanged.

Be well,

Ben