Combining younger and older students, the Hayground classroom is a community endeavor, where each child is treated as an individual and is expected to participate as both student and mentor.
Although the younger children work mostly in similarly aged classrooms, all the children from ages 6 to 14 work together in mixed-age groups. As a result, surprising and fruitful friendships and partnerships emerge. Children can zoom ahead, or ease along with as they need to, without the stultifying and unnatural constraints of narrowly defined groups. These groupings lead our teachers to pay constant and careful attention to each child, to see the children as they are rather than as their birth dates predict they should be.
Our approach to grouping is not as new as it might seem. Kids of all ages have been playing and working side by side in one-room schoolhouses, playgrounds, and rural communities for centuries.
Our Early Childhood Group is comprised of our youngest children (ages 3 to 6), our Middle Group has students ages 6 to 11, and our Senior Learners class encompasses ages 12 to 14.
Hayground students are seen as individual learners with unique interests, strengths, and challenges. Teachers and mentors work closely with students to set individual learning goals and discover each child’s personal connection to the material being explored.
“...At Hayground each student has a curriculum designed just for him/her and is formulated for the deepest and the most challenging learning at the appropriate development level. ”
The underlying goal at Hayground is to make sure each student is deeply engaged in reading, writing, and working with numbers in ways that both engage and intellectually stretch them. The apprenticing experience of every student is deepened in the classroom by creatively focused scholarship. The projects vary from student to student. One teacher is responsible for overseeing the student’s whole program, providing continuity to their experience while helping them link different aspects of their work.
As Hayground students get older, their educational needs change. Therefore Hayground has designed the Apprenticeship Program for Senior Learners to suit these needs. While keeping with daily goals for children, the Apprenticeship Program extends their learning beyond the classroom. As an apprentice in an organization/business, our students must exhibit independence, confidence, self-motivation, mastery, and interpersonal skills in our local community. The students are assigned work in which adults, other than the Hayground faculty, provide them with feedback.
In addition, each spring the Senior Learner students determine an area of study into which they want to delve. They are then assigned a faculty adviser and engage in intensive and focused research. This study culminates with a written report as well as the Senior Learner Presentation, a demonstration of the information, knowledge, and experience gleaned throughout the process.
This kind of meaningful forum for scholarship is immensely beneficial to our students; it makes them responsible for their learning in contexts that extend beyond the classroom.
The following are just some of the projects developed by our students: A Short History of the Atomic Bomb, French Cuisine, Narrative Photography, Stories of Immigrants, Nature Photography, Early Childhood Teaching, The Teaching of Reading, The Solar System, The Photography of Movement, Native American Cuisine, and A Biography of Coco Chanel.
Hayground is a community of readers and writers. The goal of our literacy program is to help all students discover joy in the process of reading and writing, and become lifelong learners who use the written word to think, understand, and communicate effectively.
Early Childhood (age 3 to 6): Through daily discussion, oral reading, storytelling, and pre-writing activities, young learners are immersed in a language-rich environment that builds a strong foundation for literacy and an intrinsic understanding of narrative structure.
Middle Groups (age 6 to 11): Emergent readers become fluent readers through one-on-one mentoring, partner reading with an older student, and daily group reading and discussion. Students write for real-world purposes—to teach others, tell a story, explain a project or compose a letter--and edit, revise and discuss their writing every day.
Senior Learners (age 12 and 13): Hayground’s oldest students further their critical reading skills through close reading and discussion of essays, articles and books. Students write frequent essays in response to texts read independently and as a group, thus developing analytic and expository writing skills. Culminating projects include an essay written for review by a published writer, a 5-10 page essay for the Senior Learner Project, and, for those graduating, a speech to present to the Hayground community at graduation.
Just as Hayground strives to instill a love of reading, art, and empathy in its students, so too do we strive to help our students become confident, happy mathematicians. We firmly believe that the best way for children to make sense of math ideas is to build them, discuss them, defend them, and use them in meaningful tasks. We want our students to solve problems fluidly, make meaning of numbers, shapes and data, and understand the kinds of answers that are reasonable in any given math situation. To these ends, we employ the following curricula:
Investigations in Number, Data, and Space: Designed to help students make sense of mathematical ideas, this K-5 program uses concrete representations of numbers and conceptual games to explore arithmetic, geometry, data, measurement, and early algebra.
Connected Mathematics: Designed for middle school students, this inquiry-based math curriculum emphasizes depth of understanding of key concepts through classroom discourse and collaboration, connections among mathematical strands, and connections between mathematics and other disciplines.
The Hayground School Studio Art and Garden program has become a laboratory for projects nourished by the fertile ground where art and science converge. Four years ago, we began searching for ways to make art about the world of creatures that are too small to be seen by the naked eye. Curious about the microscopic organisms that nourish plants and aquatic life, restore the soil, and are the foundation of the food chain, we asked ourselves: Where would life in the oceans be without phytoplankton?
The Art of Science Project - students in this collaborative, cross-disciplinary program investigate one of our planet’s major living systems, then bring that system to life in a gallery-size installation at the Parrish Art Musuem.
We knew we were encountering them daily in our work in the gardens and compost piles, and that they were present by the millions in a handful of earth. We had read of their exploits extending over a period of several billion years, converting the sterile clay of our barren planet into a world of unimaginable diversity. Our fascination with these single cell organisms, eukaryotes, prokaryotes, fungi, and algae led us to build two 14-foot totems, an homage to bacterial life, as an installation in the Parrish Art Museum student exhibition. Through these totems we told the stories of thirteen micro organisms, portrayed in heroic scale. How could a single cell like Choanoflagellate, the common ancestor of the first terrestrial life forms to branch off from the sea, still be ubiquitous today on every landmass on earth, 850 million years later?
As we struggled to portray these characters, our conception of scale became inextricably entwined with the way these bacteria transcend their actual size and reach epic proportions through their accomplishments. We were free to build as storytellers rather than scientific historians. We searched for materials that would serve our needs as builders and we found a guide, the biologist E O Wilson, who granted us permission to imagine other ways of seeing, ” A cell is like a miniature rain forest in which to conduct expeditions to find and describe organic structure, variety and formation.” We searched for colors that suited these beings, sewing fabrics, entwining wire strung with seed beads, floating artichoke seeds, pipe insulation, transformed into rings and arcs. We told the story of volvox globator, morphing from a single organism to a grand spherical colony of 100,000 members, using inflated latex to make the orbs. And to quote E.O. again, “since so …since so much of good science, and perhaps all of great science, has its roots in fantasy, I suggest that you engage in a bit right now.”
Our most recent three installations at the Parrish have followed this format, finding inspiration in the world of science: the honey bee as queen of the food chain, the coral reef as the land of exquisite invertebrates, and seeds as the legacy of the past and the future. We are inspired not solely to make art, but also to conserve our environment. Our partnership with environmental and science education consultant Stacy Meyers has led us to avenues of action and service that connects us deeply to this place we love and hope to protect.
Proposed Arts & Science Building
This love is based on a deep knowledge of nature. We study the coastal ecosystems. We grow dune grass and spartina alterniflora to restore eroded marine habitats. We walk the coastline through the salt marshes at Tiana Bay, collecting specimens and drawing the small colonies of newly hatched horseshoe crabs around Ponquogue Bridge. We maintain saltwater aquariums, managing the food chain without commercial additives, and raising local seahorses and coral. We hike the greenbelt trails, studying trees, taking photographs and making drawings. We admire the invertebrate specimens we find and make art with seaweed in herbarium presses. We celebrate the liberation afforded by our expansive outdoor classroom while clearing debris from Crooked Pond and helping to keep motorized vehicles off the trails. We study water sources, their quality, and management at Shinnecock Canal, Trout Pond, Northwest Creek. Our eyes are open to the fact that “ the original level of biodiversity is not likely to be regained in any period of time that has meaning for the human mind.” Yet perhaps through changing our behavior and values, we can challenge the historical and scientific exceptionalism that threatens this place.
Academically, we look to the E.O. Wilson curriculum, specifically the levels of organisms and ecosystems, using his five principles:
Teach and learn from the top down. First address larger questions already interesting to students and relative to their lives, then dissect the whole down to the foundations.
Focus on problem-solving
Commit yourself and trust your instincts
Reach outside your field of inquiry, into the kaleidoscopic sub-disciplines that are the emerging hybrids of the known world. Biology has expanded to the borders of social science and the humanities, and they to it. There is a wide domain of unexplored phenomena open to cooperative approaches from both sides of the divide.
Cut deep and travel far.
Through all of these grand concepts and far-reaching speculative thoughts, there runs a river where the tributaries of art and science converge. That river is play. That stream runs through the Hayground sandboxes, its ever-changing banks and courses altered daily, hourly, by children from 3 to 14 years of age, absorbed in these engineering feats, nature and child united in an endeavor, to keep it flowing.
History is alive at Hayground. Whether discussing Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Macbeth, the origins of the English language, or the state of the East End’s coastlines, Hayground students use the historical lens across all disciplines as a tool to examine the cultural, political, geographic, and economic forces that shape where we are today.
In addition, Middle Group and Senior Learner students choose one historical topic that pertains to their class’ unit of study. This topic forms the basis for a year-long history project involving research, documentation, and writing, and culminates in a presentation to the larger Hayground community. Recent projects include:
Children In American History: An examination of the important roles children played in key historical events.
The Huntington Crossway Project: A documentary film, written and produced by students, about the history of a local neighborhood, combining historical research, oral histories, and interviews with residents.
A History of the Book: An in-depth study of written communication, from hieroglyphics to the printing press.
1692: A comprehensive look at Colonial America from a multiplicity of perspectives.
The Narrow Lane Project: An oral history of a storied Bridgehampton road, gathered from residents and local historians.
Rather than simply studying history, science, and literature, we want the students to work as historians, scientists, and writers. The program of each classroom differs depending on the interests and work habits of students and teachers.
Instead of what are often termed “specialists,” we bring in experts in various disciplines for intensive residencies. For example, the scientist-in-residence works with a small group of students on his or her own research project or to help a group of students develop research projects. Working intensively with the scientist, the students more closely resemble apprentices, analogous to research assistants that a professor might hire. In this way, students are able to create and build upon their knowledge base by engaging directly throughout their research experiences to develop their conceptual knowledge, field and lab techniques and continue the research beyond the initial question.
Some of the Hayground’s authentic endeavors for students include Gardening, Culinary Arts, Filmmaking, Studio Art, Inventor's Workshop, Bookmaking, and Professional Apprenticeships.
“Hayground prepared me by making sure that I was ready to enter a new environment. The senior projects help because in high school you do a lot of research projects so this helps our writing, researching and ability to handle criticism.”
At Hayground, art is a way of life. The sophistication and intensity of the children’s aesthetic practices permeate the whole Hayground experience. We believe that the process of making art is one of the most immediate ways for children to find pleasure in pursuing their own ideas. Students spend various amounts of time in the art studio, from two hours once a week to three hours per day for ten days in a row. They apprentice to the artist-in-residence in his or her own work and also have the opportunity to work directly with a variety of professional artists who are part of our Visiting Artists Program.
A pillar of the Hayground curriculum, this program invites professional artists, writers, and musicians to share their craft in immersion workshops that challenge students to think, create, and perform as authentic working artists. Residencies over the years include:
Music History with Tiye Giraud
History gets a brand new beat with award-winning composer, percussionist, and vocalist Tiye Giraud. Through work songs, children's chants, traditional instruments and dance, Hayground students explore the myriad manifestations and influences -- from Blues and Jazz to Reggae and Calypso -- of Africa's rich musical heritage.
Shakespeare Performance with Shakespeare & Company
In this annual month-long residency, professional actors from the Berkshires' Shakespeare & Company lead the entire Hayground student body -- from ages 3 to 14 -- through an in-depth exploration of the story, text, and history of a Shakespeare play. The residency includes daily theater games, warm-ups, and rehearsals, and culminates in two public performances.
Folklore and the Oral Tradition with Gale Jackson
Language comes alive with Hayground's storyteller-in-residence -- the poet, author, and cultural historian Gale Jackson. Using folklore, poetry, and oral traditions as material, students examine the origins of words, the history of language, and the power of the narrative form. Early Childhood students learn and discuss traditional folktales, and perform one for the Hayground community. Middle Group and Senior Learners hone critical thinking and writing skills through small group seminars and writer's workshops.
Music, Instrumental and vocals, with Hudson Music Studios
Students learn piano, guitar, drums, vocals, and more in music classes that explore the vast repertoire of rock-n-roll, folk, and other styles from around the world. From the very first class, Hayground students are playing and singing in ensembles, and later perform school concerts throughout the year. Our curriculum for our youngest students is centered around singing, percussion, and as they mature they join our instrumental program. Once that spark of curiosity is ignited and students are inspired, learning an instrument, singing, and composing becomes second nature!
Hayground avoids the prescribed classroom curriculum, believing that children and teachers should instead delve into whatever questions and endeavors are most compelling to them. However, the teachers are guided by a series of criteria for what should be happening in the classroom as well as a set of goals of what should be unfolding for each child. This frees the faculty to be lively, rigorous and creative in what they do with children while still ensuring cohesion and continuity.
Hayground expects all students, regardless of age, to be engaged in the following activities every day:
Assessment at Hayground happens on a daily basis, as teachers observe, interact with, and mentor each child. Each student’s progress is documented and communicated in three ways:
Parent Conferences: Teachers meet with parents twice a year (in the fall and spring) for an in-depth discussion of their child’s work as a student and as a member of the Hayground community. Parents receive written Conference Notes from the teacher, documenting their discussion and highlighting areas of strength and areas to improve.
Student Narrative: Each winter, teachers compose an in-depth narrative for individual students in their class. These narratives form a complete picture of the whole student at mid-year, addressing academic and social-emotional growth in the classroom and within the larger Hayground community.
Student Portfolio: Every Hayground student, from age 3 to 14, collects a body of work that demonstrates their growth over the course of the school year. Portfolios include creative writing, artwork, reading logs, history reports, scientific research, math demonstrations, and individual projects related to classroom endeavors and Senior Learner apprenticeships.
