Evergreen Academy is a secular, nature based microschool in the heart of Conway, Arkansas, serving students five to nine years old. In its own words, a modernized version of the traditional one-room schoolhouse, with cozy indoor learning spaces and immersive outdoor ones on an urban flower farm.
Evergreen keeps its record in Prism. Between August and May, three people wrote 520 entries about what happened there, most of it outside: a field with a pecan tree, a creek, a raised garden bed, a play yard with a gaga pit and a teepee. This is that year, a month at a time.
On the first day of nature play, a few of them built a structure out of crates and loose parts. Two days later came a music area, and then they played for the group.
They unwrapped old crayons, broke them into pieces, set them in molds and put them out in the sun on the big field, predicting what the colors would do when they mixed.
At the pecan tree they found that twisting a pecan off works better than pulling, and that a cup is too narrow for the harvest. They went and got a bucket, and carried it together.
They used every outdoor block there was to build a base for their workers, with a floor and shelves.
Hyacinth peas, harvested and taken apart at the outdoor table.
The luffas in the raised bed came ready in October, eight months after they went in. The dried gourds peel by hand once you get through the hard outer shell, and then you cut them open with scissors and find the black seeds. They put the spongy insides in water to see what water would do to them. Everyone took a bag of seeds home to plant in the spring.
First, every nail and every rubber band you were given had to go into the pumpkin: nails hammered in, bands stretched across between them. Then a design of your own, carved out of shapes, with the carving tools and almost no help.
Citric acid, baking soda and water made a fizzing potion, and afterwards they wrote down what they saw. For the ghosts, the paint was blown around with a straw, which is harder than it looks.
After a picture book about a man made of leaves, they went round the campus for materials and made leaf creatures of their own.
On a leaf hunt they matched what they found against identification guides. The hyacinth beans from the garden beds were shelled, for play and for art.
They learned how animals get through the winter, hibernating and adapting, and built a den for an animal of their choice. Then the ice came, and they went all over the campus finding it.
Cranberries float. Cut open, they turned out to be full of air pockets.
The cranberries went under a handheld microscope, and the parts were graphed: seeds, flesh, air pockets and skin. The ornaments were paint, poured and swirled.
When the snow came they filled buckets of every size, stacked the shapes, and built snow people, a dog on a leash, and a whole city.
After several books about birds' nests, they talked about what birds use and how, then made nests of their own. Some made eggs to go in them.
They took owl pellets apart in pairs, checked the bones against a diagram, and worked out what each owl had eaten.
The gaga pit went into the play yard in January. At first a facilitator was needed for most disagreements. By February they were settling most of them themselves, under rules they had agreed were fair, and playing for long stretches.
A tortilla folded into a triangle is a lesson in halves, quarters and eighths. They cut shapes into the folds and opened them out into snowflakes, cooked them one at a time on the electric skillet with tongs, put toppings on, and ate them. Food safety came up along the way.
The water cycle study began with the fact that water covers seventy percent of the Earth, and that the water we have now is all the water there has ever been. It ended in dioramas, made with little help.
They watched a hawk swoop down, catch a mouse, and sit with it in the cedar tree for a long time.
A facilitator was invited into a library during nature play time and was stopped at the door, which was the entrance to the teepee, to be issued a library card. Inside were crates of hand-drawn books to check out, and a pile of magazines to browse.
The spelling routine has five steps and they do all five for every new word. Trace the raised letter card with a finger. Write it in the bead tray. Write it on the plastic grid. Write it on the glass. Write it in the sky.
During nature play they found caterpillars and built them a hotel out of crates, with a habitat and a nursery for each kind. As the week went on the cocoons formed inside the rooms they had made. There was water put out, and a graveyard, for the caterpillars that did not make it.
The nature study that month was rocks, and it turned up in play. Most of the week went on chiseling and polishing large pieces of quartz with tools, then laying them out in order from most expensive to least, with price tags for the special ones. Eye protection on, hammers looked after, and reminders to each other about the rules of the work site.
In May they noticed birds hunting around the campus for nesting material, so they cut lengths of yarn and string and put them out.
entries, written by the people who were in the room.
months of them, and not one month under twenty.
people wrote them, in the ordinary course of running the place.
of the entries carry two or more subject areas in their Learning Signals.
Language arts is the most documented subject of the year, well ahead of mathematics, at a school that spends its day outside. It arrives through the picture book that opens the morning and sets up the work that follows, a handwriting routine with its own vocabulary of line and letter size, and spelling traced on a raised card, in a bead tray, on a grid, on glass. Science here is not one subject but a dozen, and the nature study moves unit by unit through the year: luffa in October, cranberries in December, the water cycle in February, rocks in April, the solar system in May. The most documented skill of the year is fine motor. Hands, mostly.
Every moment here comes from Evergreen Academy's own record: the entries its three staff 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.
“Our students get to enjoy childhood and a school space the way we believe it is meant to be: mixed-age learning, plenty of outside play time, and space to be creative and lead in their learning experience.”
Evergreen Academy, from evergreenacademyconway.com
A nature based microschool in Conway, Arkansas, for children five to nine, on an urban flower farm.
A year at Evergreen Academy 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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