Our Nature Curriculum
We're spawned from a complex, amazing universe — filled with neutrinos and molecules and Venus flytraps and great white sharks. The natural world abounds with excitement and puzzles and joy!
And yet science classes often feel dry and dull.
What if a new kind of school could connect kids with the blooming, buzzing confusion that is nature?
Our schools will aim to take students into more depth and complexity by middle school than many of us got in college. We will —
- ground kids in a rich history of science curriculum which prompts them to puzzle out natural mysteries alongside the likes of Galileo, Darwin, and Marie Curie.
- get out into the woods to help kids fall in love with nature.
- vigorously study the geology and ecology bound up in a single, local natural site.
- bring a diversity of animals and plants into the school, and have kids regularly observe their anatomies and behaviors.
- turn the kitchen into a laboratory and pay close attention to why chemicals act the way they do — why do sugars brown, egg whites whiten, and fruits ripen?
- dissect toasters, light bulbs, and other technology and puzzle out how they work.
- make a Makerspace.
- connect everything we study back into the 13.7 billion-year-old history of Life, the Universe, and Everything!
Our goal is to help every student become something of a naturalist, and fall in love with the complexity of the world around (and inside) us.
We strive to re-enchant the cosmos — or, better, to show kids that it already is enchanted.
The universe is not a world of separate things and events,
of external spectators and an impersonal spectacle.
It is an integral whole.
–Ervin Laszlo