Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Caroline Huss was doing some research last week, but it wasn’t going very well.
She was trying to survey fellow students at Crawfordsville School about how they thought the school playground could be improved.
“They’re all busy,” she said, noting that she’d only interviewed 18 people and she wanted to talk to 25.
Crawfordsville students and teachers were busy, all right, making catapults and K’nex creations, learning about germs and about American Indian culture, knitting, drawing, or, in Caroline’s case, helping to create a newspaper.
The school just finished four weeks of Discovery Classes, in which, according to Principal Elena Barton, students from first through sixth grades are able to choose classes that interest them and that deal in some type of “educational component.” Ages in some classes are widely mixed and many classes are led by parents or other volunteers from the community. Barton said the school has held the classes for eight years.
“The kids get to choose classes,” she said. “They are given a menu a couple of weeks ahead of time. They love it. One kid told me it wasn’t taking the class they liked so much. It was being able to choose, having a little power over their education.”
Barton said the school tries to have the four-week Discovery Classes, held for an hour and 15 minutes on Thursday afternoons before school lets out, once during each trimester. She said a new series of four-week classes is planned in late January or February, and another in the spring.
In the newspaper class, held in the library with teachering assistant Michelle Keene and parent Shauna Baxter, students drew cartoons and wrote stories for the “Crawfordsville Buzz,” as the paper was to be called.
Sixth-grader Cassie Johnson was writing an advice column. She said she was responding to questions ranging from how to handle a classmate who is cheating to dealing with new braces.
“I said that if someone is cheating, tell the teacher,” Johnson said. “If you don’t, they’ll keep being dependent on others for answers.”
In another room, Teresa Whitebird-Hubert was leading seven students in the creation of “talking sticks,” used by Indian tribes to designate who was to speak and ensure an orderly discussion on matters of great concern.
The most popular class was catapult-making, in Brett Bowers’ classroom. Perhaps not surprisingly, all but a few of the 18 students were boys. Other particularly popular classes were K’nex construction, led by Stephanie Jewett, and drawing, led by Carol Smith and Brian and Jamie Dinsfriend.
“What this has really done is gotten parent and community involvement at a higher level than usual,” Barton said. “We’re always looking for volunteers.”