Belmont Homeschool of Living Culture Overview.

Most of our days will be spent outside under the shade of maple and oak trees, dancing out stories, painting our landscape, cooking and baking our own wholesome locally grown/organic snacks, singing songs and building bi-lingual Spanish/English language skills using hands-on creative and interactive games and natural artistic mediums.

Your child will have the opportunity to shape their own outdoor play area, through simple caring work like: planting, watering and harvesting plants of fruits, vegetables and herbs, mixing cob with their feet and hands to build a play house. Building a frog pond, stacking wood rounds and rocks. They will also have plenty of opportunities for climbing trees, jumping rope, building sand villages in the sand box, exploring water and other natural elements. Belmont park is only a block from our house for some structural climbing or water park fun and with a city bus stop just a block from our house, the city is ours for field trips; downtown, to city parks and recreation areas, nature walks and other fun community events.

Though our primary class space will be outside, during inclement weather or super hot or cold days, we may have to spend some time inside. Our indoor space will be a round beautiful sunny natural yurt structure made from non-toxic wood and canvas. In our inside space, your children may enjoy putting together a puzzle with a friend, molding clay or bees wax into fun shapes, putting on a puppet show, exploring some musical instruments or many, many other fun indoor activities. Workspaces in both our inside and outside spaces will be rotated out regularly, based on seasonal themes and the core interest of the group. These sections will be well thought out and neatly organized spaces that naturally encourage focus, creativity, interactive play, fine and gross motor skill development, critical thinking and depth.

Our School Yard and Permaculture plan for BHLC

What you see here is a permaculture landscape plan for the backyard, created for us by Christine Gyovai, of the Blue Ridge Permaculture Network. It is a presentation of the plant beds and their contents, as well as play areas and the location of the yurt and the cob playhouse, which the children will help build. If you click on the graphic and zoom in, you will see the tremendous amount of detail in the drawing. On this plan, you will finds areas of berries and medicinal and kitchen herbs, vegetable patches, and fruit trees. It is our hope that the children will participate regularly with the planting and nurturing of these beds, as the plants grow and their fruits become part of their snacks, their songs, and dances.

Music~Food~Language~Nature

Below you will find the four main pillars that comprise the philosophical mission of our preschool.

~Music~

If there is a main component of the preschool, I would have to say it's music! Since early in life, music has always been a part of me. I hear it in my waking life and I write sound tracks to my dreams. I love music from all over the world and being able to share that with the children is by far the biggest motivator for me wanting to start this preschool. A brief example of what I hope to accomplish is to expose the children to diverse rhythms and tonalities that are locally and globally traditional through interactive work stations such as gardening, mixing cob, making food, and harvesting fruits and vegetables. They will also have the opportunity to experience and experiment with other art forms such as theater, dance and circus arts, intertwined with musical elements as a part of formal and informal activities.

~Food~

When Dave and I were living in Latin America back in 2000, we began to really get into farmers markets and eating fresh, organic and locally grown whole foods. Since then, we have pretty much eliminated processed foods from our diet. Preparing our meals with our children is a ritual that we enjoy everyday. We hope to encourage in them at an early age the love of planting, cultivating, harvesting and preparing their own meals. This is why food is one of the main components of our mission. Children will be involved on a daily basis in the preparation of their own snacks and eventually we hope that some will be left over for them to take home. An example of what we have in mind is: I just recently had a chat with the owner of Wade's Mill, in Rockbridge County, about selling us some whole organic corn so that we can begin experimenting with making our own fresh corn tortillas, with the help of the children. We hope to perfect this endeavor and be the first C'villians to make our own organic masa from local Virginia corn!

~Language~

Now about Language! I am likely the first Mexilachian gal of the Blue Ridge. My mother is from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and my father is from Luray, Virginia. I grew up in the Shenandoah valley Spanish/English bilingual, surrounded by a host of Mexican and American cousins, uncles and aunts, singing rancheros and bluegrass, tejano and country. Being Spanish/English bi-lingual has afforded me so many deep and profound experiences and opportunities in my world travels. Not to mention it is the second most commonly spoken language in the U.S., arguably making it one of the most useful languages to learn. This is why I feel that offering the children exposure to Spanish in parallel to English on a daily basis is important. We will have the opportunity to have a native Spanish speaker from Costa Rica with us most days. The Spanish language will also be infused into our daily routines, through circle time in the morning and during play time as well, through songs, books and fun movement activities. My inspiration is that through exposing our children to two languages, we will be setting them up not just cognitively to absorb languages in general, but to also introduce to them the idea that we share this planet with other people in the world who have rituals and traditions that are are very similar or different from their own. We will be bringing in artists-in-residence yearly to do fun workshops with the children, and you too, if your interested!

~Nature~

Nature provides the most perfect classroom. It alone has inspired math, science, history, geography and literature. The great outdoors is a child’s greatest teacher and their dearest friend. I strongly believe that children should spend most of their day outside playing with bugs, watching and chasing birds and squirrels, playing with rocks, sticks, mud, natural plasters and pigments, sand, water, making bricks, piling log slices. Building structures with cob, straw and basic stick frames. Buckets, rakes, shovels, seed collecting, gardening, planting and harvesting of fruits, vegetables, flowers, trees. Swinging, climbing, tumbling, running, skipping, jumping. Getting ‘really’ dirty, yes, dirty, like a real kid should! This is why our primary classroom will be outdoors.

How will the school be structured?

At least here at the get go, we will have a maximum of 5 children, aside from Luna and Mareana. We will be operating along a standard calendar year, with school starting the first week of September and going through the first week of June. We will have a break for Thanksgiving and the Christmas/New Year Holiday, and there will be a Spring Break week off, somewhere in late March/Early April. The key here is that we won’t be having a bunch of teacher workdays and Mondays with no school. We want you to be able to drop your kids off and get your stuff done. The school day will be 8:30-12:30, three days a week. Our first choice would be wed, th. Fri and the second choice would be mon. tues. wed., but since we know that both of those schedules are non-traditional, the default option would be Mon. Wed. Fri. We will be providing a hearty snack mid-morning, but parents will provide a healthy lunch for the kids. The lunches need to be consistent with the idea of healthy unprocessed non-sugary food that we are practicing during snack time. Please see the separate post about food policies.

Nutrition and the Small Child

There is nothing more satisfying to a small child than to enjoy the fruits of their work. When it comes to food, we strive to eat food that is mostly organic or locally grown and definitely unprocessed and without any refined or chemical sugars. We strive towards balanced and truly healthy snacking and we are very open to the ideas and suggestions of the community. One thing that is very important is to instill an understanding of the whole food cycle, from planting the food to its harvest, preparation and consumption. The preparation of food will be very central to our daily routine, and will also be a main inspiration for the creative endeavors of the children, as we invent songs and dances to honor and celebrate the agricultural cycle and our place in it.

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child? ~Lin Yutang

the indoor classroom

We are planning on putting up a yurt in our backyard to serve as the indoor classroom. This is our friend Kyle's yurt. Luna and her friend Wren are in the foreground. A yurt, for those unfamiliar, is an adaptation of a traditional Mongolian housing structure, made with a wooden lattice frame covered with waterproofed canvas and nylon. It will be a light and airy structure. Ours will include wooden doors and windows and be on a foundation with a cedar deck. We also like yurts because they are circles, and spending time in the yurt will keep the kids connected to nature and the directions of the seasons.

To give you an idea of what the inside space would be equipped with, here are some examples of stations that would be available in various combinations throughout the year based on a theme we are working on or a particular sessions: Dress up, wooden blocks, puzzles, books, puppetry, interactive games, kitchen/city market section with money exchange booth, arts and crafts table, interactive science table (i.e. shells, insects, flowers/plants, rocks), musical instruments, small stage area, small and gross motor skill manipulation tools, tools to build cognitive and language (both Spanish and English) skills, Letter, number, shape, color matching games and exercises.

The Enrollment Process.

We encourage you to write us with questions, suggestions or ideas. We are always open to dialogue. We also would like to encourage those of you who can make it to come to our Friday morning play groups, every last Friday of the month from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., beginning February 25th, 2011. Here, we can watch the children play in the space that we plan to cultivate as our classroom and we can talk about any specific questions you may have. For those of you unable to make it to a Friday morning play group, we can schedule a time that is convenient for your family to come and visit us.

Since we will only have five spots available in starting the school, we want to begin the enrollment process soon so that you will have an opportunity to decide whether our environment and core values fit with what you envision for your child and family. Once we have interviewed all interested participants who have requested to be on the list for enrollment, we will contact each of you individually as soon as we have enough children who we feel would make a well balanced class environment. We hope to have a committed group of five families ready to start by the week of September 5th, 2011. We plan to keep it small so that we can focus on the quality of the program and the cultivation of lasting relationships.

Cob and Natural Building Materials

This is a picture from the mountains outside of Santa Barbara, at Spirit Pine Ranch, where our friends Betty and Tautacho live and teach workshops in natural building techniques. This is a house made of cob, which is a traditional adobe like building material that can be easily mixed, even by small children using rough sand, clay, straw and water. It is amazing and fun material to build with and play with. It is made by stomping and dancing with your feet until the ingredients are blended together. A wonderful way to teach pre-academic science concepts is through the study and use of natural building materials, including cob, earth, natural plasters and pigments, reclaimed wood and stone. Also, the rhythmic nature of the process of creating cob opens up all kinds of musical group dance opportunities.

Son Jarocho in the preschool curriculum

This is our dear friend Pablo Campechano Gorgonio, of Santiago Tuxtla in Veracruz state, Mexico. He is the maker of our son jarocho instruments and is a wonderful teacher, singer and guardian of his roots culture. This is at a fandango in his town. Son Jarocho is a Mexican folk music style with its own family of instruments, which features zapateado (foot dancing) as the main percussion instrument, improvised call and response vocals and is notable for being a very inclusive musical culture which is easily accessible for little children. The little girl in the foreground is waiting for her turn to hop up on stage and dance. When I was first introduced to Son Jarocho it reminded me so much of the music I performed as a child growing up in the Shenandoah Valley in Luray, Va. I used to be part of a couple of clogging groups. We would perform on Skyline Drive a few times a year for tourists and for festivals and local celebrations. Every culture has it's folk traditions. Though the rhythms are somewhat different, the form is the same, a family of folk instruments, free style verse improvisation, foot percussion and traditional garb. Over the years, I have learned various styles of clogging, tapping, stepping, Zapateado (Mexico) and Zapateo (Peru). We plan to introduce some of these basic foot work styles and rhythms to the children.

La Tarumba and Chebo Ballumbrosio

This is a photo of Chebo and I and the children that I worked with at La Tarumba in Lima, Peru during the summer of 2001. La Tarumba is one of my main inspirations for starting our school. Since that summer, I have dreamed of manifesting a school or a Casa De Cultura (house of culture) like this. La Tarumba teaches children PreK into adulthood through classes and workshops in music, theatre, dance and circus arts. During the summer in a rotating schedule, the kids participate in all of these activities and at the end there is a grand performance that combines all that they have learned. Ah, I must tell you about Chebo Ballumbrosio! Chebo is an accomplished Afro-Peruvian percussionist and dancer who carries the tradition of his people from Chincha Del Carmen, Peru. I have learned so much about music from this amazing man. He was the first person that introduced me to using my body as a percussion instrument. Mine and Chebo's relationship started off with me taking percussion lessons from him and then we discovered that his fancy footwork (Zapateo) and my traditional fancy footwork (clogging and tap) were not really all that different from one another! I learned so much about the impact of cross-cultural exchange that year! Aside from music and dance Chebo is also an amazing clown, painter and chef.

This is Estela and Dave B. preparing Kung Pao Seitan at La Casa del Pan in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. This was a restaurant that we performed at every night when we were living there and we volunteered to be guest chefs to celebrate the week of their 7th anniversary. It was so great to get to know the local markets and food system there and share our own passion for creative organic cooking with the cooking staff at the restaurant and the members of the San Cristobal community. We made about 90 plates of food and raised 80% of the money in that one night to build a school building for indigenous kids in one of the mountain villages nearby.

Interviev with Estela Peredes, Director of La Tarumba Circus School on the Relationship between the Arts and Culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toveyOQM_pk

Here is a clip of an interview I did with Estela Peredes, the director of La Tarumba, an innovative Circus school in Lima, Peru that I worked at in 2001. We were introduced to Estela P and La Tarumba http://latarumba.com/ingles/escuela.htm by our good friend Lucho Mena. This magical place is the primary inspiration for our school project. It is a circus, music and theatre school for children and young adults three and up. I could curtainly write a book about how amazing and wonderful this school is. It changed my life and the way in which I view early childhood education. This clip is just one piece of a long conversation that I had with Estela P about the history of La Tarumba and her perspective regarding the importance of the arts and cross cultural exchange and how they influence culture.