Curious and Kind Education is a self-directed learning community in Sarasota, with five main programs: Nature Stay and Play for families, caregivers and children alike; Forest School, ReWild Afterschool and Summer Camp for ages 5 to 12, forest immersive and child-led; and LaunchPad for teenagers, with Mental Health Mondays, academic co-work support, and Flying Squads exploring the city.
The Forest School and LaunchPad document their learning in Prism, and that record is what this page draws on. Days start outdoors with connection, then flow into a forest, a creek, a playground, a house with a kitchen, and the community off campus too. In its own words, the practice is child-led and structured to nurture projects. Nine adults wrote down what they saw while it was happening.
Beautyberries were in season, so they picked them and made lemonade. A few days later came a beautyberry un-jam, which turned out to be more of a syrup.
In September the hopscotch course reached 190 squares, and they joined the finish line back to the start, which made it infinite.
Instant challenges for the teens: a tower of paper and paper clips that had to hold at least five books, built in thirteen minutes by teams drawn from a basket of crayons. Then a zipline to carry ten marshmallows.
The teens spent three weeks at an innovation lab in town. The first day was a list of everything they could possibly build, an icebreaker about how technology had changed their lives, and a headset that put them on a planet with an alien in it. The second week was 3D pens and first prototypes. In the third week each team presented what it had built to the parents.
Before dropping pumpkins off the bridge, they talked a lot about whether they would float. The pumpkins went under and popped straight back up.
The beautyberries came back as jello. A pumpkin pie was made from scratch, starting with a whole pumpkin. The teens built foil boats to hold twenty marbles for two minutes, and found that the wide, sealed ones floated best.
The teens put up a slack line and could not get the kink out of it until a video showed them how. They added a second line to hold on to. Then the forest schoolers tried it, one at a time, with a grown-up nearby.
They rode bikes to the state park along a trail that was once a railroad, and read the marker that said so. By the ride back they had counted five gopher tortoises.
Felting soap. The tiny barbs on wool hook onto each other, so wool wrapped around a bar and rubbed holds tight. A few of them added designs with felting needles.
After almost three years of looking, the first shark tooth turned up in the creek. Then four more.
Lunch had been chaotic, so the adults assigned lunch groups. The ones who did not like the arrangement made signs and posters, marched out of the forest chanting, and picked up support on the way to the house. The group stopped for an unscheduled meeting, heard everyone out, and went with one of the children's proposals instead. Lunch after that ran quiet enough for a couple of them to nap.
On the way to morning meeting they found an owl pellet on the ground, and took it apart: bones, hair, teeth and claws.
Greens planted before the winter break were ready in January. The radishes turned out spicy.
The egg drop started as one of their own ideas. Four teams built containers and dropped them from further and further up, and two eggs came through. Two weeks later the whole group went at it again with bubble wrap, tape, cardboard, egg cartons and straws. Afterwards they found out that an egg held whole in a fist will not crush, however hard an adult squeezes, because the force spreads around the shell.
It was starfruit season. They sliced the fruit into stars, one of them with six points, and dried them, tasting a few halfway through: sweeter and more tart, like candy.
Three of them ran the kitchen for a birthday cake: zest grated, juice squeezed, almond flour weighed, whites separated from yolks. It was gluten free and dairy free, which was the point, and it turned out to be the birthday child's favorite flavor anyway. Fresh coconut went round the table afterwards.
They tried to make hot air balloons from bags and candles. None of them flew.
The teens climbed a canopy walk 74 feet up into the treetops. From the walkway, an alligator in the water below.
A box of old scratched records came in, and they tried melting them in the sun, moving them around for heat, using a car as a greenhouse, and finally the kitchen oven, where the discs folded into bowls. One bowl landed on another and nested. Weeks later they were still at it: a lower temperature, scissors, rectangular pans, the finished pieces put in the freezer. The discs that never softened became frisbees.
Instant challenge: in groups of four, build a house for a mouse, then sell it. The pitches covered food, comfort, and protection from cats.
In October the teens sat through Sharks 101: telling one species from another, what is expected of you on a research boat, why the data matters for the sharks in local waters. November's trip was called off. In March they went out with the shark scientists. Nothing was caught. They spent the morning on the water learning how the research is done, and a second group on board ran an ecosystem activity and a trivia round with prizes.
At a historic site on the bay the mangrove leaves tasted of salt, and tiny snails lived among them. Back at the forest, a lizard was shedding its skin, and eating it as it came off.
Creek exploration turned into a barter economy: clay, fish and clams, and a long discussion about fair quantities.
They went down to the creek for clay and dug it out of the bank by hand, then used it to build a bridge across the water. What they had by the end of the afternoon was a dam. They stopped over the spelling and the two meanings of the word, then decided to leave the dam where it was.
Palmetto fronds, woven over and under, then the opposite on the next row; not everyone finished a mat the first day. Stick baskets that looked like baskets, and were best set down gently and not touched again. Pinch pots and mugs in earthenware clay, left to dry before the kiln.
They met two young manatees who had been separated from their mothers. The calves will stay where they are cared for until they weigh at least 600 pounds.
The Creature Feature, begun in September, got a laughing moth, bees, and a few more small creatures.
entries, written by the people who were in the room.
adults wrote them, in the ordinary course of running the place.
of the entries carry two or more subject areas in their Learning Signals.
carry a photograph.
Most of what the adults wrote down happened outdoors. The environment is the most documented subject of the year, which is what a forest school looks like from the inside, but the year also runs through the visual arts and through the body: painting, whittling, sewing, games, long walks. Reading, writing and mathematics turn up where they are needed: the currency the children designed for a mall they ran all year, the measurements for a cake, a hopscotch course that reached 190 squares, an argument over whether a bridge was a dam. And more than anything, the record is social. Two out of three moments carry a social-emotional signal, and collaboration is the most documented skill of the year, in every one of the nine months from September to May. The same threads run the whole year through: working together, solving problems, noticing things, being outside.
Every moment here comes from Curious and Kind Education's own record: the entries its nine adults wrote in Prism over the year, a photo and a few sentences at a time. The small capitals under each story are the Learning Signals Prism found in those entries.
“At Curious and Kind, every child is valued, cherished, and encouraged to embrace the joy of getting a little muddy.”
curiousandkind.org
A self-directed learning community in Sarasota, Florida: Nature Stay and Play, Forest School, ReWild Afterschool, Summer Camp, and LaunchPad for teens.
A year at Curious and Kind Education is one of a series of pages Prism makes with the programs that use it, from the record they keep over the year.
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