Rooted
Our campus offers trees and tepees to climb, and log ships to captain. We provide age-mixed cohorts so that old and new can swap their ages’ advantages, and our site has a unique assortment of hidden dens, forest trails, loose parts, riotous flowers, and water features that endear children to their natural contexts. Please read below for more…
Percentage of time spent outside each season: Summer—100% | Late Summer/Fall—90% | Winter/Spring—80%
EarthStar Farm
Since summer 2018, Foxtail’s first season, Chad and Susan Waite of EarthStar Farm have been our generous hosts, granting us access to the joys and hardship of life on the farm. Our “classroom” is energized by bleating sheep, strutting chickens, towering cities of hay, flowers to eat and adore, and the silent hum of millions of active organisms rising and falling each day.
Examples of natural phenomena and ecological processes abound for the free, uninhibited exploration of the forests, pastures, and shady meadows, in addition to those moments of didactic, structured learning when bright relationships and associations compel us to stop, gather, and closely listen.
Web: http://www.earthstarfarm.com / Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarthstarFarmWhitefish/
Scenes from the Farm
sisu (n)
“stick-with-it-ness”; a popular Finnish term for patience and strong will without overweening passion.
“If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
Sense of Place
The outdoor, or friluftsliv, ethic of Foxtail Förskola is rooted in building a sense of place. This is an aspect of our school that will never be quantified, collated, or copied into a best practices manual. This is, chiefly, about spending time in a place and beginning to notice: a yard, a national park, or an entire watershed. Drawing connections as we grow gives us the blueprints to trace the contours of that relationship and act in accordance with that place or, as Wes Jackson sees it, “consult the genius of place.” This concept is ultimately about nurturing a young affection, finding non-competitive refuge, or smultronställe, and building bonds with the land to preserve a mutual integrity.
“Look underfoot. You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
We could all be aerialists like squirrels, divers like seals; we could be purely patient, perfectly fleet, walking on our hands even, if our living or stature required it…When we lose our innocence…we take leave of our senses.
Only children can hear the song of the male house mouse. Only children keep their eyes open. The only thing they have got is sense.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
“We are animal in our blood and in our skin…We were not born for pavements and escalators, but for thunder and mud.”
Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths
Fresh air impoverishes the doctor.
Danish proverb
