Holden School Connections

Excerpted from the Holden School Winter Newsletter

During second quarter Holden School and Holden Village changed--our number of students doubled, snow fell, temperatures dropped and trails froze.

Holden’s lone upper elementary student (up until January 22nd!), 6th grader K., returned to Holden School in October along with his brother 8th grader E., after beginning their school year in New Castle, Maine. Although K. misses sports and the middle school social scene, he’s found a sense of purpose at Holden School in the projects he’s taken on this semester. He’s written essays and poems, and read novels by Lois Lowry, Natalie Babbitt, E. L. Konigsburg. K. has mapped Holden’s food supply and calculated the average distance our food travels for National Geography Week. He’s crafted a comic book exploring the evolution of hominids and created a timeline of major events in Ancient India. According to K., working on projects which he can display for his fellow villagers is one of the best things about going to school at Holden.

The elementary school students continue to study science most days. M. and M. have worked hard to help me shape the school library into a center for nature discovery complete with owl and grouse feathers, dried lichens, Ponderosa bark, terrariums, birds’ nests, and a whole wall full of potted plants. They’ve also filled the hallway with their science learning covering the walls with a taxonomy chart which displays their knowledge of species and sorting and posters about geology and the rock cycle. K. serves as a leader in the science classroom, both participating in and helping to facilitate activities while M. and M. bring enthusiasm, interest, and creativity to class each day filling the room with energy, curiosity, and more questions that I know how to answer. M. and M. particularly enjoy doing experiments, planting seeds, looking at feathers and lichens under the light microscope, and watching Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Holden High School students have undertaken a full semester of studying environmental literature. During our first unit we focused on “American Explorers” reading John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Berry, and Woody Guthrie, among others. We looked at images from National Geographic and watched the film 180 South. Our unit culminated in a project where the students imitated one of the pieces they’d read and wrote a rhetorical analysis of both the original work and their imitation. A. and A. chose to imitate Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” E. wrote a song in the style of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” and C. found inspiration in an excerpt of Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire.” We’re several weeks into our second unit on “American Eaters and Farmers.” I’m very excited about our future reading, writing, and conversation. It’s been fun to watch our conversation become more nuanced as we develop our class canon of environmental writers, poets, and thinkers.