Why We Started The Ecoliteracy Project
When people visit us for the first time, they almost always mention the noise. Not chaos, well, sometimes a little chaos, but the sound of forty kids arguing about whose turn it is to feed the chickens, negotiating over who gets the good digging spot, and generally sorting things out without an adult stepping in every thirty seconds. I still catch myself standing in a doorway some mornings just listening to it.
I spent over twenty years in schools before this one, the kind with quiet corridors and uniform handwriting inspections. I won't knock that entirely; my own handwriting is better for it, and there's a place for that kind of structure here too. But somewhere around year fifteen I noticed that the kids who sat stillest and wrote neatest weren't necessarily the ones asking the most interesting questions. That bothered me more than I expected it to.
Roots, Branches, Canopy wasn't dreamed up in a strategy meeting with a whiteboard. It came out of years of watching what a five-year-old needs versus what a fourteen-year-old needs, and admitting when something wasn't working. We scrapped our first version of the Branches river unit after about eighteen months because the kids were bored stiff by it, if I'm honest, and a few of them told us so directly. We rebuilt it around the actual stream behind the school instead. That's still how we change things: when the evidence, or the kids, or the garden, tell us we got it wrong.
If you're weighing us up for your child, skip the open day and come on an ordinary Tuesday instead. You'll see the noise. You'll probably see some mud too. I think that tells you more than any tour I could give you.
