September 29, 2025

Important Dates…

Tuesday, September 30-Thursday, October 2: Class Photos. Please see detailed schedule below.

Tuesday, October 7: Dine to Donate, 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at Chipotle in Troy.

Friday, October 17: School CLOSED for Teacher Professional Development/Conference Preparation.

Saturday, October 18: Autumn at Overfield. Games and food will be available from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Pumpkin Glow walk will be open from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Monday, October 20-Friday, October 24: Visiting artist, Jake Lockwood of Muse Machine, at Overfield for week-long residency.

Insights from the Studio

In my 16+ years as Overfield’s Atelierista, I’ve developed some favorite ways of approaching certain key materials with children. I love to offer big blocks of clay alongside tiny balls so children see right away how this amazing material can be both strong and delicate. I like to offer color mixing with plenty of opportunity for experimentation. Hearing that red and yellow make orange and seeing the transformation in front of your eyes are two very different things. There are other materials that I’m still trying to figure out the best way to offer children. One of my favorite materials to wonder about is “beautiful stuff.” This term for loose parts was coined by Reggio practitioners and introduced in an inspiring book by the same name. I love the poetic and inspirational quality of the term “beautiful stuff.” In the hands of children, these odds and ends and leftovers are beautiful in all their possibilities.

This fall, we’ve approached beautiful stuff in a new way in the studio and are seeing awesome results. Instead of corralling bibs and bobs into clear glass jars or a couple of beautifully rainbowetical shelves, we’ve set the entire north end of the studio as an atelier (laboratory or workshop) of composition. Open trays and dishes of beautiful stuff fill four different shelves and three different tables. Children of all ages are being offered time to examine the items in the space and create with them. We’ve introduced the idea of composition as “putting something together” or “making a picture” with the items. When Primary students heard the word “composition,” they immediately connected it to the concept of decomposition, as in logs being taken apart into component pieces. The thought and conversation connected to this composition laboratory is both deep and wide-ranging.

We’ve watched children construct sets for storytelling, create marble mazes, test the sound-making properties of different materials and combinations, and relate stories from their own lives brought to mind by everyday objects. We’ve seen them sort, inquire, share, and exclaim. We are still in the early days of uncovering the learning opportunities of this particular studio setting, and I look forward to sharing more about our discoveries as the year progresses. This has been a collaborative effort. I’ve worked closely with our Musician/Librarian, Carla Briggs, to set this space, and we’ve had help from many other staff members who have offered ideas, materials, and who have worked closely with children in the space to observe and document the learning that is happening there.

As Program Lead Beth Poronsky wrote in our newsletter last week, “We think children are born researching their world, using all of their senses to investigate; they participate in gaining knowledge about their world, and they have their own ideas and theories about life. We believe and witness that children use a hundred languages; they have a hundred ways of listening, thinking, playing, marveling, and loving.” We see this in the studio every day, and I’m delighted by the new languages we are discovering this year.

Elizabeth Perry – Atelierista