Integrated Academics

In real life, everything is interconnected. The education at Running River is geared so that all learning is connected in the same way. One of our aims is to help children understand life as a whole process. In most schools, learning is fragmented into separate academic categories, with no unifying focus or interweaving thread. By integrating academics around a theme, children learn about a topic from every angle, teaching them the skills they need to learn about anything in depth, from the details to the bigger picture. This micro/macro perspective shift is the natural way for children to learn. Children always want to know why, and want to know more. Running River leaves no stone unturned when it comes to exploring children’s longing to understand, and to connect to, what they are learning. Rather than being satisfied with the acceptance of simple answers, we want our students to enter adult life with the yearning to fully understand the world in which they live, and to have a lifelong love of learning.

Through out the year, we will be teaching life skills such as carpentry, gardening, cooking, sewing, cleaning, caring for machines and more. For each unit, we will begin with an essential question. For example: what is food? The class will then brainstorm the essential question, and each child will come up with branches of that question that they personally want to pursue. That will be the entry point for an in-depth, multi-faceted exploration into food. They will also brainstorm all possible resources from computers and books, to experts in the field to field trips. For example, the students, as part of this unit, will be learning to cook (the students will be cooking the school’s lunches); studying the history and origins of different food (starting with what we harvest from our garden and local farms in the fall); managing a budget and learning to shop; nutrition; chemistry; using math to calculate meals; using language arts to research, write a cookbook, read literature that relates to food; write papers, stories, poetry, articles for the school paper; interviewing organic farmers; planting and harvesting food; building a coldframe/greenhouse, depicting food in art, learning songs about food, practicing mindful eating, and the list goes on.

The children drive the process through questioning and solving problems in multi-age learning pods that use collaborative learning to bring out every student’s interests, ideas and talents. At the end of each unit, children will give presentations to demonstrate their learning.