Free Union
Country School

... with friends, cider, crafts, laughter, and lots of toys collected for children at UVA hospital. Initiated and carried out exclusively by Free Union students, they wish to express their gratitude to all who joined in!

You can hear about it, read about it, see a video about it. But until you've played it, you're likely not to fully appraciate the relationship between force (a kick) and mass (a ball). These students get Newton's 2nd Law of Motion.

Third, fourth, and fifth grade art and science students have been working on something that combines visual art, environmental science, and social justice. Our art teacher Courtney explains: We talked about what makes for a visual argument that invites you in. We also discussed water and water conservation. A nationwide project that was titled, “Imagine a Day Without Water" was reframed to "Imagine a Day WITH Water" that now includes the aspirations of the many with no water because it has run dry by drought, been turned off because of poverty, or contaminated by toxins. New ways to look at art, water, and people.

It is only appropriate that the breeze was blowing leaves through our gorgeous outdoor classroom at Free Union Country School while we were hard at work designing our FantaSeeds: seeds with fantastic dispersal mechanisms!

Today, we awakened our observational skills, practiced using magnifying glasses and jewelers loops, studied skulls and tracks, and did some basic chemistry experimentation.

Collaboration is an important skill to learn in childhood. Recently, one of our budding artists drew dragons on the blacktop during snack recess. Many classmates admired her skills, so she offered to help create dragons for everyone. The kids took turns, listened to each other, shared techniques, and turned the blacktop into a beautiful dragon mural. Big thanks to first and second grade for collaborating to turn our blacktop into a dragon celebration!

The Free Book Bus, encouraging kids to have home llbraries and book collections, is a perfect entree to third graders' study of what it takes to make a difference in their communities. Students interview local "change makers," consider how their areas of service overlap their own interests and passions, brainstorm ways of raising start-up capital, and begin to devise tangible ways of helping and putting their ideas into the world.

The purpose of any club (rocketry, chess, ecology) is to bring students together to learn about something that matters to them. The Free Union Book Club gives kids the chance to discover what types of books interest them most. Often, children are slow to make reading an integral part of their lives because they simply are not aware of what is available to them. When they discover a genre that excites them, they welcome spending time in those new literary worlds.

A plant sale is a way for students to understand up close the growth cycle of living things and the math behind a business: cost to grow, price to sell, and profit to use responsibly. Students also learn about customer service and begin to understand entrepreneurship.

In order to sharpen their writing skills, fifth graders have been researching and writing a school newspaper. Different from storytelling, news reporting offers essential information at the top, often in the first sentence. This straight-forward approach is called the inverted pyramid model of writing, where instead of ending with a conclusion as in a story, you start with one. See more at our Instagram account or Facebook page.