Experiential Learning at Ensworth

Experiential Learning at Ensworth

By Office of Communications Staff

Paul Downey ’92, Nancy Palmer-Gift ’03, Tiffany Townsend

Experiential Learning in the Lower School

In ways both big and small, our Lower School teachers are bringing curricular content to life through immersive activities that offer students the opportunity to go far beyond retention of facts and figures and to fully absorb the knowledge that they set out to discover. The following examples illustrate this approach and represent only the tip of the iceberg that is experiential learning at Ensworth.

KINDERGARTEN: Comparison of Solids in Science

With two visits to science every seven-day rotation, kindergarten is allowed ample time to conduct ongoing experiments with Mr. Bond. They begin with the comparison of states of matter (solid, liquid, and gas) and expand upon the inquiry into properties of solids through a 10-unit experiment. Each class period, students are given two solids to compare based on the properties of color, shape, density, magnetic attraction, etc. They use balancing weights, buckets of water, magnets, and more to deduce not only that two objects are different, but identify what makes them so. They collaborate with a partner and scribe their observations on a fact sheet in an interactive activity that gently introduces them to the scientific process. Many “Eureka, I’ve got it!” moments are experienced in this unit, and kindergarteners are well on their way to more fully understanding the complexities of scientific content!

GRADE 1: Lovely and World Languages

In order to love others, we must truly love ourselves. Only when we recognize and celebrate what makes us unique can we come to the feel the same about someone else. First grade students dove into this powerful concept in their World Language classrooms this year. They read the book Lovely by Jess Hong in both Chinese and Spanish, discussed the concept of loving ourselves and celebrating differences, and then wrote a script. Each child was given the opportunity to write and illustrate a characteristic they loved about themselves, culminating in a celebratory video that paints a beautiful picture of the individual qualities that represent the Class of 2030. The impact of such a powerful concept touched the hearts and minds of each and every one of our Lower/Middle School students, as the theme of World Language Week was chosen to be Lovely: Finding the Lovely in Ourselves and Others.

GRADE 2: Student-Driven Pioneer Day

Pioneer Day has been part of the second grade experience at Ensworth for many years. What will always be an iconic educational tradition has evolved into a truly immersive approach to historical study. Students engage in an in-depth exploration of how life was experienced before technology and modern conveniences, learning step-by-step as they follow the journey of the early settlers making their way across the Oregon Trail. Along the way, students make comparative charts of life then vs. now, assume fictional personas, and log daily journal entries as if they were on the trail themselves (and play the classic computer game that we all fondly remember). While they haven’t churned butter with marbles and mason jars of late, it is because the teachers have empowered the students to choose their own cultural project from the time period and become the leaders in sharing such with their peers. Mrs. Moeller sums it up best, “As our second graders move on through their lives, they may not remember what state Chimney Rock was in, or what the names of the forts along the Oregon Trail were, but they will know that they can learn and teach a skill and that, though making something oneself can be tricky, with the help of a friend and some tenacity, there is usually a way to get it done!”

GRADE 3: Serving up Empathy through Service

While second grade students connect to the experiences of the past, third grade engages with the challenges of the present as they learn about homelessness and food insecurity through their partnership with Bridge Ministries. They study the issue and available services and are empowered to choose their own creative approach when it comes to promoting their service learning project. The goal is to collect items for the Bridge’s Holiday Toy Drive, and they are asked specifically to collect on behalf of eight- and nine-year-old peers. Not only do students relish the opportunity to collect gifts, but they also gain an empathetic understanding of those they serve in realizing they, too, are third graders with similar wishes. It is up to each and every student to choose how they’d like to advocate for the toy drive—some make posters, others make collaborative educational videos, and all of them study the nonprofit, the issue they address, and the solution they propose. The act of receiving generosity and the joy it brings in sharing it with others will certainly not be lost on our future fourth grade students.

GRADE 4: Future City of Ensworth

In light of the capital campaign activity on campus and inspired by Bodys Isek Kingelez’s City of Dreams exhibit featuring sculptures made of recycled materials, Lower School Art Teacher Kathryn Swords and her fourth grade students made their own Future City of Ensworth art project. This project inspired such enthusiasm that students on their own volition would arrive early to school to continue their work. Solo structures coalesced to create a collaborative city as one student’s Tiger Scraper connected to another’s Futuristic Weather Station, which resided next to the interactive playground. Kingelez’s motivation was to construct his own vision of a harmonious home, city, and planet, and used the medium of recycled materials, as did our students. They studied his work, referenced scholarly materials, and had group conversations on what their ideal vision of school would contain. They chose whether to work individually or as a pair and sourced everything from feathers, to cardboard, to popsicle sticks to bring their buildings to life. Given the freedom to answer for themselves what this Future City of Ensworth would be composed of, they discovered that individual contributions to a collective made a most vibrant vision of what is to come, tiger-shaped buildings and a dolphin-shaped aquarium included.

GRADE 5: Interdisciplinary Lewis & Clark

The study of Lewis & Clark and their western exploration has grown into an interdisciplinary study that is a hallmark of the fifth grade experience. While rooted in Humanities, the analysis stretches into activities in unexpected places—from math class to class trips and beyond. Students do not merely read history books to learn about the historic expedition; they examine archived journal entries and consistently evaluate the pros and cons of Lewis’ decisions at key points of the journey. They also study the history of the boats and forts available in the time period and build model structures accordingly. For a creative spin while studying line graphs with Mrs. Dale, they plot the winter temperatures of the Northern Plains in 1805. Spoiler alert: there’s quite the negative slope! They have a leg up on Lewis & Clark but still experience a taste of the excitement when they try their hand at orienteering, with the use of a compass and a topographic map, while enjoying time at Land Between the Lakes. New horizons are explored while history brings to life an immersive educational experience for each and every fifth grade student.

Experiential Learning in the Middle School

Grade 6 Museum Project Brings Ancient Civilization to Life

All Grade 6 History classes, taught by Ruby Cortner, Maurice Hopkins, and J.K. Scott, brought wonders of the ancient world to life by creating a pop-up museum event in Patton Hall for the entire Lower/Middle School community this fall.

After learning about different civilizations in class, students were given the opportunity to contemplate what ancient wonders interested them the most. Then, the teachers held a fantasy draft to determine who worked on which wonders, including The Great Wall of China, Nazca Lines of Peru, Inca Ice Mummy, Terra Cotta Warriors, the Colosseum, and more. The process shifted to an in-depth research stage, assisted by librarian Debbie Sandwith, with each student writing a detailed description and formal Works Cited.

The wonders fell into specific groups: Infrastructure/Fortresses, Statues/Colossals, Mummies, Writing Systems/Calendars, Palaces/Baths, and Temples/ Tombs. Each group collaborated on the differences and similarities between their category’s wonders.

Next, each group entered the challenging stage of writing a proposal to the Museum Committee (Ms. Cortner, Mr. Scott, Mr. Hopkins, Mrs. Dee Dee Little, and Mr. Wallace). Cortner explains, “We had to make sure the exhibit would fit in the allotted museum space and that each would be an effective learning tool. They learned to work together, further develop their research and writing skills, and know the information about not only their wonder but also the other members of their groups’ wonders, so they would be prepared to answer any questions from museumgoers.”

The students then tackled the hands-on aspect of their assigned wonder, transforming their knowledge into an interactive museum exhibition. They spent several days constructing their displays using a multitude of materials and techniques.

The hands-on element was what made the museum experience such an effective learning tool.

The hands-on element was what made the museum experience such an effective learning tool. “They had to know information about their wonder in order to teach guests about it,” explains Ms. Cortner. “In a standard test situation, it is just the student taking the information I teach and then giving it back to me on the test. With the public being part of the sharing of information, students tend to care more because they want to get it right.”

The day of the pop-up museum involved faculty, staff, parents, and students from all nine grades. Grade 6 students dressed in period garb, talked about their wonder, and guided the community through the interactive aspects of their project.

The success of the museum project spurred the History Department to involve all disciplines in the first annual Medieval Day on the last day of school. The day was filled with activities that included medieval siege machines, a scavenger hunt, drama, and music.

Cortner observed, “Jim Mann’s Medieval math lesson, Aaron Velthouse’s Medieval madrigals, Fred Schmidt’s jazz band heralds, Mary Perkins’ and Carolyn Henry’s science catapult lesson, and Dee Dee Little’s Shakespeare skits were incredible!”

One experiential learning activity has already inspired many more, and this is only a taste of the immersive educational experiences students engage in at the Middle School level. Seventh grade students conduct their own cross-curricular Memory Project in conjunction with their service-learning partnership with Abe’s Garden; eighth grade students delve into the physics of motion through the competitive Pumpkin Races, and countless debates across disciplines and grades teach all Ensworth middle school students the etiquette of civil discourse and the ability to compassionately disagree on complex topics.

Experiential Learning in the High School

Experiential Learning and Cross-curricular Collaboration: My First Book

By Teresa Todd, High School French Faculty

The “My First Book” project began after I attended my first Social Issues Conference where the Restore LaVi session piqued my interest. Former parent Diana Day-Cartee and her daughter, Ali Cartee ’18, had been volunteering in Haiti for a while with restavecs, or child slaves. They established Restore LaVi (“Restore Life”) in order to start a food program, do missionary work, and improve the situation of the children. As Diana spoke about the plight of restavecs, I immediately remembered a similar book project a college was doing that a colleague had told me about. I asked Diana afterward if books in French and English would help her, and she enthusiastically followed up on our conversation.

The first year, I recruited people who would be going into French IV or French AP as seniors, offering them a ready-made Service Learning project. English faculty Dina Marks joined our crew as the editor for the English portion of the books. Writing is such an important part of learning a language, and working with students one-on-one in the editing process to help them choose the correct tenses is invaluable. I thought that the project would allow us to work on their French outside the classroom and help people at the same time, but I was totally unprepared for their level of talent.

We discovered that we were lucky in our inaugural year to have chosen Sam Slipkovich ’17, an amazing artist, and Isabella Kendall ’17, a phenomenal photographer. Shona O’Bryant ’17 paired up with Lyra Jaffe ’17 to create the alphabet book that the Haiti school uses for instruction. Because of that one book, the Haitian school started a kindergarten reading program. And because of that kindergarten class, a former Ensworth Lower School teacher who moved to Boca Raton decided to raise money to fund a kindergarten teacher. And Restore LaVi added education to its mission statement.

The process has evolved over time in that it has become much more intentional. One of our most important process-related rules is that all people in illustrations must be people of color and need to represent the target audience. There is such a dearth of children’s books with main characters who are of color, even in the U.S. It is especially important when the character is in a position of power. Indie Charles ’22 expertly illustrated Gigi Elliott ’20’s professions book with a lovely variety of people of color, suggesting that every kid reading one of our books can be a doctor, lawyer, or teacher. Jalen Sueing ’19 looked up pictures of Haitians on which to base his protagonist and used a popular Haitian name for him. Additionally, even from the first year when Isabella Kendall ’17 was working with Maggie Zerfoss ’17 to create picture books, we made sure to be culturally sensitive.

The work is done almost exclusively on the first three Service Learning Days, and the entire process is very much student-led. If someone wants to work on the project, they tell us what part (or parts) they want to do before the first Service Learning Day. With so little time to work, the art has to be started the first day, and the stories have to be written by day two. Tech also ideally starts on the second day when they are scanning artwork, uploading images, and beginning to create the templates. The authors use the Service Learning breakout PCLs to start their books. Some students have been both author and illustrator, such as Isabella Nuñez ’19 and Jalen Sueing ’19. Lillie Waddell ’21 has chosen to author and illustrate from the beginning, and Miranda Marks ’21 transitioned from illustrating other people’s stories to writing her own.

This year, when Greg Eubanks returned from a Service Learning conference, he mentioned adding Spanish. We invited Spanish teacher Sara Bostwick to join us and she assembled a team of her enthusiastic students. The Día de los Muertos book will be finalized in the fall, as we are still working out our Spanish language partner.

When I gave Jalen Sueing a copy of his book on Awards Day, he looked at it, looked up at me, and exclaimed, “I’m a published author!” I am truly in awe of the kids’ talents; every year, I think that the books can’t get better, but they do.

Experiential Learning in the High School: Harkness on Your Feet

By Dina Marks, High School English Department Chair

One of the challenges that we face as a department is keeping alive in our high school students the joy of reading instilled by the lower/middle school faculty. High school students are increasingly focused on the grade (or the “points”) offered by an assignment, and it’s difficult to get them to slow down and focus on reading as exploration, as a puzzle to be unlocked, or as play.

Last year, as we were reading Macbeth with the freshmen, Kristin Ware was looking for a way to break the cycle of “read, discuss, assess.” For homework the night before, her students had read and annotated Act 5 Scene 1 of the play; instead of the expected Harkness discussion, however, Kristin had them work together to figure out how to stage,and then perform, the scene. She wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out, but it was so successful that I did it with my students, and now it is one of our go-to projects.

Each student has a job, and because of that, no one is sitting back or disengaged.

The first thing that we do is put a list of jobs on the board, and students sign up for which job they want to do. Of course, we need students to be actors, but we also ask for students to design costumes out of whatever they can find in the classroom, to create the scenery, to be “text experts” and counsel the actors, to be the director and keep everything running and everyone on task, and to run lighting and sound effects. Each student has a job, and because of that, no one is sitting back or disengaged. The key to this assignment, though, is that we turn everything over to the students, and then we stay out of their way while they figure out the scene. There were, in fact, times that I sat in the hallway while the students puzzled through the text and worked through the scene so that they had to come up with their own answers.

How, for example, should the costume designers show that Lady Macbeth is scrubbing imaginary blood off of her hands? What should the scene designers draw on the board to match the feeling of 5.1 of the play? What does the word “taper” or “closet” mean in this context? With what inflectionshould the doctor in this scene read his lines to effectively communicate the emotion of the moment? What do you do if your classmates are playing around and not getting to work? When we empower the students to deal with these things without offering ready-made answers for them, we allow them to overcome the anxiety of being “wrong” or “getting a bad grade.” We normalize that it’s okay to struggle and to not always know what the answers are, and we remind the students that school is a place to learn rather than a place to feel like they have to know everything and do everything perfectly the first time.