Creating Community with the Woods Primes

The beginning of a new school year is always an exciting time for both children and teachers, partly because so much is new, but also because so much is possible. Teachers, like any good collaborator, approach new experiences with careful listening and thoughtful intention. Intention centers around a “something” you mean to do—whether you pull it off or not. As teachers, we ask: What are our goals? What are we aiming to think, feel, and accomplish in collaboration with children? We’re overflowing with ideas about what kind of community we want to cultivate, but if our intention is to have the children be active members of this community, they have to be the ones who help create it, and if our intention is for the children to create it, they have to first create meaning around what the word “community” even means. The key to intentionality, I think, lies in slowing down, taking your time, and thinking deeply. 

Our role as teachers and collaborators becomes one of asking questions, documenting children’s ideas, reflecting those ideas back to them, encouraging them to reinterpret, make connections, and find meaning. Our starting question: What do you think a community is?

Via: A community is something where everyone hangs out and enjoys each other and walks around the whole city. 

Lili: A group of people. 

Alicia: It’s, like, when a bunch of people get together and help each other. 

Bea: A group of people who work together. 

Alicia: Like what Sam was doing–digging and working together–that was a community. 

Noa: Like, a whole city. Like our school is a whole city, our school is a community, our class is a community!

Mira: Yeah, a group of people who are together. 

After establishing that their ideas all related to togetherness, we wanted to gather more information about what the children’s visions for a positive community included. Creating visual representations of their ideas helped lubricate our collective thinking and offered a starting place for conversation, connection, and reflection.

“It would have a poison ivy sucker-upper. So people in the community don’t get poison ivy. I want to give poison ivy to the poison ivy! Maybe we don’t need to suck it all up, though, because that might hurt the plants? Maybe we just wash away the oil? That’s the part that can give you the rash. I don’t want animals to get poison ivy, so I want to take care of them, too.” -Lily

“I want my community to keep lightning bugs safe.” -Sankara

“I want to have a community where Black people feel welcomed. We can hang a Black Lives Matter sign on a tree. Black people weren’t treated fairly, and I want to make that better.” -Leo

“I want people to respect boundaries. I will tell someone ‘Stop’ if they’re not respecting a boundary.” -Alicia

“In my community you pick up all the trash and put it in trash cans.” -Fred

“I want people to be happy and safe around cars.” -Chase

“I want to create a community for bugs and dragonflies and a forest for all living things. I LOVE bugs! Everything deserves love, especially the bugs and animals because they are so cute!!! If everything got love, that would make the environment healthy.” -Dash

“I was thinking of all playing together to make new friends.” -Ruby

During snack and lunch each day, children shared their ideas about what they believed a community should be. We started to notice that although there was an overarching theme of togetherness, there also were many smaller, but equally interesting, connecting points. Poe and Oona want a community where we don’t smoosh bugs, and Sam wants to make safe paths to walk on. Whitney wants to label where we can dig, and Noa wants everyone to check in with their friend when they fall down. We realized these are all examples of taking care. Jenny held some office hours in the tent for children to do more thinking in small groups about the connections between their ideas. Four different categories began to emerge:

Be Kind

Take Care

Be Fair 

Be True to Yourself

“When their learning is documented, children can revisit and thereby interpret their learning experiences and also reflect on how to develop these experiences further. Interpretation and reflection become fundamental aspects of documentation that are not only retrospective, but also are projected toward the creation of future contexts for learning. Documentation is not limited to making visible what already exists; it also makes things exist precisely because it makes them visible and therefore possible.” -Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners

We spent days going through each painting again, and thinking about our developed categories. As a group, we wondered which categories went with which paintings. This was a great way to make connections between these visual representations and the written word, and to establish a jumping-off point for real life actions. 

“I want my community to include fairies. It’s okay if they don’t believe; in my community, people should get to believe in whatever they want.” -Sophia 

Ruthie: Sophia’s example is like “Be True to Yourself,” ‘cause it’s like knowing what you believe in. It’s also “Be Kind” because it’s kind to let people be true to themselves. It’s also “Be Fair” because, like, it’s fair to have space for everyone’s ideas. The categories all kind of go together!

We wondered if every Woods Prime was following along with these ways to be. We thought it might be powerful to create visual symbols for representing this thinking. 

Fred: A cymbal is something that you play in a band.

Noa: It is a kind of instrument, but also the pictures on the schedule are symbols. They show something without words. Kind of like a silent message. 

Val: Yeah, you’re both right, but the symbol I’m talking about is the one that Noa is talking about.

Bea: Yeah, something you can draw, like the peace symbol. 

On Wednesday, we welcomed Amy back to the group after some home days, and in a brilliant demonstration of collective wisdom, some of our second year Woods Primes shared with her the meanings behind the symbols they designed.

#1 “Bea and I thought of this idea together. Bea drew the face in the middle that is so happy and kind and it has eyes that are hearts, and I made all of the hearts on the outside that I think make it feel kind of like a compass–all of the directions are loving and kind and friendly.” -Leo

#2 “For being fair, it’s like an equal sign except with two lines going up and two lines going across because people have different needs, so the people on the outside have different needs, so instead of saying treat people exactly equally, notice that some people have different needs, and that’s fair. It’s fair to make sure everyone’s needs are met.” -Ruthie

#3 “This one is saying, ‘No’, and this one is saying, ‘Yes’. It’s being true to yourself because they are happy that they are making their own decisions.” -Anaya

#4 “Taking care of all things means you have to have peace. Peace is technically how you keep your body safe. If there’s no peace it overwhelms your body, and if you approach an insect without peace you could make it feel scared.” -Noa

Over the next week, we will put our efforts into creating spaces within our environment for these important ideas about our community to live. The large versions of our symbols will be on display in our tent, and a new book of their paintings will become part of our library.