California history projects
Our Waterhouse cooperative school began in Kim’s 900 square-foot, flat roof house. We hosted a diversity of characters during those early years. There was Mikalya, the darling recumbent student who taught us about her individuality as she practiced handwriting. Here was a six-year-old who could have been employed developing elaborate fonts. When it was time to journal she spent hours and hours crafting her name in script, but this was no ordinary script, this was script straight from her imagination. The term “fanciful letters” embodied the personality of the child.
Then there was Evelyn, my daughter the Kindergarten student who contentedly spent hours tracing illustrations from an entire book. Stopping to consider the academic standards involved in this task, Kim and I realized that in this single activity Evelyn not only met, but transcended certain state standards. Tracing complex illustrations, Evelyn developed her fine motor skills, strengthened hand-eye coordination, became aware of the connection between images and words, thought deeply about character and plot development and, perhaps most importantly, completed a complex task that was personally meaningful. Fast forward to high school, Evelyn would capture that certain something that made Mikayla Mikayla in the lines of a poem, “Dreamer Girl dangles / Her feet through downy clouds / Wiggles her toes over the earth / Beaming.” I have no doubt that her ability to make this profound observation about Mikayla’s individuality is in part due to the observation skills she learned to attend to as a child.
Reminiscing on our accomplishments during those first three years in San Luis Obispo borders on poetic:
• Pumpkin quilt
• Pysanky eggs
• Embroidery and soap making
• Rug hooking, and yes, basket weaving
• Ceramic snowmen
• That cool woven stool that took so much time
• Yarn dying and hand crafted knitting needles
• Pinwheels and the tee pee
• Lewis and Clark and US history quilt
• Little stone houses
• California quilt
• Woodshop class and glass mosaics
• Cooking cakes, breads and pies
• Taffy, cookies and Parker house rolls
• Crater experiment with marbles and flour
• Volcanoes and mapping the systems of the human body
• Bean sprouting and butterfly hatching
• Monarch field trips
• The rat maze and the rabbit’s chariot
• NASA launch and the Smithsonian
• The Saint Louis Arch
• Tide pools and deserts
• Piano keys plunking at all hours and the rat a tat tat on drums
• Pumpkin patch about a thousand times
• Elephant seals and beach clean-up on Earth Day
• Rug hooking
• Mark Twain’s childhood home
• Wilder girls in the hand sewn prairie dresses
• Visiting the pizza kitchen
• Over and over to the LA Science Center and the Natural History Museum
• Faith Ringgold slide show and giving her gifts
• Zoo trips and the whale watching boat
• Del Monte Café and the Santa Barbara Mission
• Teddy Roosevelt and the 13-year-old expert in NYC
• Civil War Sites, amestown and Williamsburg
• Clipper ships and Carnegie Hall
• D-Day and the beaches at Normandy
• Monterey Bay Aquarium
• Pigs, horses, goats, bats, iguanas, elephants
• THE GETTY!
• Misty of Chincoteague
• Mount Saint Helen’s National Park
• Timelines and maps
• Medieval history, War, and the ancient world
• Chinese history and the history of Israel
• Chumash Indians and the California Gold Rush extravaganza
I will never forget that first year we reserved the Community Room at our public library for a little open house, a time to help our students celebrate their accomplishments. My brother-in-law, Mark had one comment, ”Evelyn did more work in Kindergarten than I did in all of elementary school.”
– Sara