Resiliency Across Grades

The concept of resilience is an important one throughout FSP’s curriculum. Third and fourth grade will explore, over the next few months, the ways in which the interconnectedness of the communities that live in and around Casco Bay– both human and nonhuman– contributes to their resilience. Last year’s fifth and sixth-grade students read Ann Clare LeZotte’s Show Me a Sign, a novel about the resilience of the deaf community on Martha’s Vineyard. Through their forest program, Kindergarteners explore ways in which the FSP forest and its creatures are resilient in the face of changing weather conditions, and they work explicitly on strategies they can use to support their own resilience (Plan ahead for the weather! Keep mittens out of the stream!) during cold or wet forest kindergarten days.

Seventh and eighth-grade students and their teachers, Pete and Nicole, are currently deep into their study of ash trees through the statewide Ash Protection Collaboration Across Waponahkik (APCAW) project. In 2023, Friends School students first participated in the project, which brings together scientific research and traditional Wabanaki ecological and cultural knowledge to protect and preserve the ash in the face of the twin challenges of climate change and the emerald ash borer infestation. In addition to their ecological study, students are learning how the story of the Wabanaki is also one of resilience and interdependence, and the ways in which indigenous cultural values of Relationship, Responsibility, Respect, and Reciprocity have been essential protective factors in their story.

Over the past few weeks, students have been working on identifying, assessing, and mapping the ash trees on FSP’s property and the adjacent Falmouth Land Trust Underwood Springs Preserve. Students will begin harvesting seeds for banking and propagating, with the help of the Wild Seed Project, later in the season. This year, a focus of the project is on monitoring forests for “lingering ash,” the 10% of trees that are naturally resistant to the emerald ash borer and may hold the key to the ash’s survival. Students also learn how forest communities as a whole are essential to the ash’s survival.

Resiliency, in fact, is a key goal of FSP’s social-emotional work across the grades. In the first six weeks and beyond, the work of building expectations, facilitating classroom communities, and fostering a sense of belonging for each student is what allows students to take the kind of risks that support deep learning.