Over the last few weeks our older learners have taken a deep dive into stop motion animation. The video shown here is one 9-year-old’s first exploration of the technique. Rebecca has been attending Juniper Root for the past 4 years. She is creative, compassionate, self-motivated, and kind. She loves reading books on all sorts of topics and sharing her wisdom with our younger learners. Her curiosity drives her to make sense of most everything we place in the school environment. When she’s not planning and coordinating all manner of events during the school days, she spends a lot of time working with different mediums at the art table. Her family also maintains an environment at home that nurtures her love of learning, creating, and innovating. On several occasions, she has baked cookies from her original recipe and sold them door to door to her neighbors. Nobody asks her to do these things. These are her passions, and we are here to support her in their pursuit.
We introduced the Stop Motion app a few weeks ago in response to a collective desire to explore filmmaking. Our older learners are able to utilize tablets during the morning in our rooms for children ages 6+. We have a lot of conversations about healthy usage of these devices so that we can all develop positive relationships with this useful tool.
Since we added the Stop Motion app, projects and ideas have been steadily flowing. Most of the learners have been using Legos to create elaborate storylines. Rebecca decided to use clay and paper for her creation. She also decided on her own to place the camera above her work to take ariel shots instead of using an eye-level view.
She created the video featured here in under an hour. Aside from asking me for blue and black paper, she did not request any sort of instruction for this project. Students at Juniper Root are given the amount of direct instruction that are open to or that they request. In this case, offering suggestions or input would have interfered with her creative process. Some skills require more direct instruction than others. A month or so ago, Rebecca and another child asked Morgan, one of our facilitators at Juniper Root, to help them learn how to crochet. They discussed how they would need to sit and work together for an extended period and figured out a good time to do so. Rebecca now has a crochet project that she has been working on over the past month. She does so on her own time and knows that she can come to Morgan if she needs assistance. She has also continued to refine her film-making skills, working on projects with her friends and learning how to add sound effects, steady the camera to take clear pictures, and just generally improving her technique.
Self-direction is complex and nuanced. It requires time, space, and trust to develop in an emotionally safe and supportive environment. The skills that children learn at Juniper Root are not simply an indication of their ability to receive direct instruction. The more visible abilities that children acquire are a sort of byproduct of the underlying traits that we are most interested in helping them develop: executive functioning, creativity, communication, risk assessment, emotional regulation, time management, taking initiative, processing information, critical thinking, seeking/accepting support, overcoming challenges, and vulnerably doing a thing imperfectly as they work towards mastery. At Juniper Root, children continually refine these skills through play. As they mature, they can then apply these abilities to navigate the school environment, gaining the skills and knowledge they require at any given age. Juniper Root serves as a safe, simplified microcosm of our broader culture. Thus, the navigation skills they cultivate here will be invaluable in life beyond Juniper Root as well.
In our swiftly evolving culture, it is impossible to know exactly what hard skills our children will need in order to thrive in the future. We trust that children are intrinsically drawn to develop specific abilities when they are given time to discover and remain in touch with their unique passions and drives. As they pursue these interests, we support them in developing the underlying soft skills that will prepare them for whatever landscape they encounter at any given age. By raising resilient, adaptable children with a relentless passion for learning, we set them up to lead a fulfilling life every step of the way.
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