Our Fridays

This year with my small tribe of seventh graders, we’re experimenting with a few things. One of these is using our Fridays differently. The school has a half-day on Fridays, meaning school ends at 12:30. As I watched this group through fifth and sixth grade, I noticed a developing readiness to engage in the world outside of our small school. And education is a life, right? So we’ve arranged our schedule so that we work hard on academic work Monday through Thursday, and we use our Fridays for a few different things.

We want our students to move from an elementary-school development of relationships inside our community toward the middle-school development of relationships between our community and the outside world. With that in mind, here’s how we’re using our Fridays:

1. The last two years, we went on a nature walk once a month on a Friday morning, each time to the same part of the Greenbelt trail. We observed the changes of the seasons, the verdant swimming hole transformed into barren, rolling rock, turtles and daddy long-leg colonies, cardinals and snakes. We learned that stretch of earth. This year, we will still do a nature walk once a month, but we will be exploring a different nature trail or park each time.
2. The last two years, students with strong habits of work completion could apply to work during their study halls as volunteers in younger grades. They might drill math or phonics flashcards, listen to kindergartners read, or help out with pre-K play learning stations.  This year, our class will be working at Community First! Village as a group service project once a month.
3. We will go to several museums throughout the year. We started out, last week, by taking the city bus to the art museum to look at the modern and contemporary galleries, tying in with our studies of the 20th century. The adventure was two-fold; some of my students had never been on the bus before. Opportunities for map use and real-world engagement more than made up for the extra transportation time .
4. We started out our Fridays by learning to make pastry crusts and apple pies in the school kitchen. Other “skills” Fridays this year might include a brief sewing lesson. I’d love to see short lessons in carpentry, wiring, basic auto maintenance, or money management.
5. Each student will get to plan one of our Friday adventures during the year, choosing a place they would like to go or a skill they would like to learn or an activity they would like to do. The student will plan our morning and make the arrangements. I can’t wait to see what they choose!

Our Fridays tie in well with the commonplace book; each Friday the students must make an entry. So far, they have a recipe for pastry crust, a nature sketch, and a copy of a work of contemporary art. In my own commonplace book this past week, I tried to capture the dearness of the earnest sketchers crouched over their books and dwarfed by the grand, sun-filled gallery with its canvasses.

All of this sounds too too lovely. Here are the open inquiries:

1. Will the students be able to maintain a high academic focus and efficiency the other four days on the week so that we can continue to use Fridays this way?
2. Is the continual arranging of plans sustainable over the course of the year? Will I wish, in April, that I could come in and just open to the next page in the Latin book?
3. Is the concept scale-able to a larger class than mine, which is quite small this year?
4. Are we achieving the goals of pointing students outward, fostering flexibility, work ethic, and relationships with their city?
5. Is there anything that we are NOT doing with that time that should take priority? Is this use of time helping them lean toward wisdom and a full, informed life more than advanced academic work would? Or, stated another way, is it too soon for that “outward movement”?

In the face of these questions, I crave greater wisdom than I yet have. I’ll be keeping my eyes and ears open for signs of answers. In the meantime, we’re relishing our adventures to the fullest.