The Treehouse is an intentional community where kids are introduced to new ideas, follow curiosity, develop interests and design their own passion projects. In its homelike setting, kids are given space to explore its creative studios: a makerspace, a tinker station, a mud kitchen, a loose parts playground, a sound studio, a builder's shop and more.
The Treehouse keeps its record in Prism. Between September and May, six people wrote 636 entries about what happened there. This is that year, a month at a time.
At showcases the kids share what they have finished or are still working on, and take questions from the audience. The festivals and parties are theirs to plan and run, often for families and the neighborhood.
The day opens and closes in a circle. In the opening one, everyone hears which offerings are on that day, and says what they want from it and what they will need help with.
A crew started a house in the loose parts playground. The boards would not stand until the stakes went into the ground properly, so that came first, then hammering nails, then taking turns with the drill. Roles turned up as they went, including a lookout and a farmer. They left it half built with a plan: finish the walls, then sew a flag for it.
The older group set out to build a haunted path, and the enthusiasm thinned once they worked out how much building it would take. It got done a little at a time, with the computer lab shut until the setup was finished. Afterwards they cleaned it up and talked through what they would change. They made a rule for next year: anyone who wants to act comes to the meetings, helps set up, helps take down.
At the colonial market some chose to be highway robbers and stole from the tax collectors. Then everyone spent their coins on a top for the tournament, and agreed to play just for the fun of it.
Ahead of the Renaissance Festival, everyone measured, marked and cut a sword of their own from PVC pipe. A lot of them held the pipe down for each other while it was cut.
It was planned in guilds: the merchants guild set up a fortune-telling business, and the adventurers guild ran sword fighting and archery. On the day there was a sword tournament with the PVC swords, a station for making shields with animals as symbols in a coat of arms, watercolor painting with a talk about how paints were once made from natural pigments, and floral wreath headbands. Traveling troubadours played a tune on recorders at every station, and a traveling tea merchant came by with the story of the cacao bean, and hot chocolate.
In a lava tube in the canyon, they sat down, turned off the lights, and sang a song together in the dark.
A group planned a Christmas path through the yard for neighbors and families, then ran it themselves: the flyers, the lights, troubleshooting the power until every string came on, and a photo spot with mistletoe for the parents. They found out that drying paint can't be rushed.
Gingerbread houses came two ways: pre-built with hot glue, or from scratch with frosting. A lot of them chose the harder way, so they could eat the whole house.
January's plan got made at a coordination meeting. Some clubs carried over and some were new, including a run of experiments built around bubbles. They chose to leave more room in the schedule for personal projects. They looked up the forecast and stood outside to feel the temperature before deciding which days would be the outdoor ones. Four of them wrote their own ideas onto the calendar.
Filmmaking ran for weeks. They practiced wide, middle, close and establishing shots on tablets, taking turns as camera and as actor, then panning, tilting and tracking. One film was told with whiteboards for puppets. At the end of the month the younger group had theirs finished in time for the festival, and sat through the older group's films in a room full of people.
At the roller rink the little skaters were the down-up club: every time they went down, they popped right back up.
February's theme was remix: take something familiar and make it your own. The youngest group wrote soda recipes on cards, then mixed small samples of them with droppers.
They took the mentos and the diet coke to the park, and the explosion was small enough that the afternoon ended in plans for a bigger one.
Late in February they ran a timed challenge: answer as many questions as you can using books and your own heads, nothing looked up. One team took it by a single question. The week after came the read-a-thon, some reading in pairs and reading to each other, some reading alone, all of them logging titles and minutes against the library's reading challenge.
The youngest group went to an orchard of 400 fruit trees to learn how to prune for more fruit. They adopted three rows, pruned and fertilized them, and were due back to harvest in June.
Rainbows from old CDs, glasses of water and sunlight. Then boats from recycled materials and loose parts, tested before the race; the ones too heavy on one side had to be balanced.
Tables, hand-made signs, and wares each of them had planned and made. Fewer customers turned up than they had hoped, so they started trading across the stalls instead. The ones who had borrowed money to stock up spent the week after on how a loan gets paid back, and on interest, before the loans were turned into grants. They decided to steer clear of debt for now.
At the egg hunt the older kids hid eggs for the younger ones, then hunted in the tall grass themselves. They pulled apart an old tree stump looking for the golden egg, and never found it.
A crew caught a lizard and learned what ornate tree lizards eat, how long they live, and how they can drop their tails when stressed. They built it homes until it ran away. Another crew built sets to photograph lizards in: a house, a school, a bike shop and a city pool.
A tour of the natural history museum: axolotls, scorpions, snakes, and preserved things including an eight-legged pig. They learned that an axolotl can be chilled to slow its body down while it heals. There was a snake to touch, and a scavenger hunt to fill in, some sounding the words out, some drawing what they could not spell.
Eggs from the farm trip went into the incubator, timed so some would hatch on the last day of school. They learned to candle them to see which were developing; half the brood was lost, and they stayed hopeful. At a nature park they caught and released minnows, leaning out over the low water, while turtles swam past.
The last showcase of the year was a full house, with the audience asking questions about one another's projects.
entries, written by the people who were in the room.
people wrote them, across the nine months of the school year.
of the entries carry two or more subject areas in their Learning Signals.
Visual arts and engineering are the most documented subjects of the year, with language arts and mathematics close behind, and those two mostly turn up inside something else: a recipe copied out before the ingredients go in, a sign-up sheet for the computers, the prices on a market stall. The skills that recur most are solving problems, working together, and thinking in space. The interests that ran the whole year are building, being outside, and making things by hand.
Every moment here comes from The Treehouse's own record: the entries six people there 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.
“I have had a mom bring me her oldest son (her two younger were already enrolled) to do a trial day. She specifically said, I see all the cool things you guys are doing on Prism and I just think he would love it here.”
Jennie Jones, founder and director, The Treehouse
A full-time microschool for curious, creative learners, ages 5 to 15, in downtown St. George, Utah.
A year at The Treehouse is one of a series of pages Prism makes with the programs that use it, from the record they keep over the year.
See the other microschools Keep a record like this at your program
