Davis Enterprise, April 15, 2008 

Not your garden variety education
New school aims to encompass many facets of a holistic foundation
By Julie Rooney
Enterprise staff writer

In dappled morning sunlight, preschoolers explore the play area at Escuela Alobos. A child pulls a wagon. Others create a logjam as their tricycles converge on a cement pathway. A young boy pushes a toy truck through the sand, as another cares for a babydoll.
About 40 families are enrolled in the Spanish immersion preschool by the nonprofit Peregrine Project that opened in West Davis in September.
In the fall, the program will expand to offer the Peregrine School, a dual immersion elementary school with a pre-K/kindergarten class for 4- to 6-year-olds.
Program directors Lorie Hammond and Elena Whitcombe say their goal is to offer a new kind of learning that gets away from standards-based testing and "No Child Left Behind" politics, and focuses on a thematic approach that is driven by children's interests, curiosity and creativity. Classes will be limited to 15 children with three main teachers and expert visiting teachers.
They call their school a "garden school," with most activities taking place in the large outdoor play and learning environment. The children eat and play outside, as well as participate in many learning activities at the outdoor table.
"They spend more time outside than inside," Hammond says.
Hammond, who is a science educator at Sacramento State and has set up gardens at schools all over the region, says the garden is more than a place to grow food. In the early grades, it can be used for 75 percent of the science, she says.
"It goes along with our overall thematic and holistic approach," she says. "You have a garden that can serve as a science lab, for children to be in touch with nature, as a way for them to explore and as a source of nutrition."
Adds Hammond, "We want to have a green school, and the garden is part of that."
When school begins in the fall, the pre-K/kindergarten classroom will be housed next door to the preschool class, with both rooms sharing the outdoor space. The directors plan to continue the programs that have been popular this year, including offering expert instructors who teach weekly yoga and music to the students.
As the preschoolers learn Spanish through the school's Spanish immersion program, the kindergartners will participate in a dual immersion program — the difference being that with dual immersion, academics will be taught in English, while concepts will be enforced in Spanish later in the day.
Says Whitcombe, "Based on a fair amount of evidence, children do best if they learn to read and they learn their basic skills in their native language, but at the same time we want to continue the Spanish."
She says Spanish is just one facet of an educational program that focuses on academics, arts and culture, family involvement, and health and wellness.
Whitcombe, a physician, is at work on a wellness curriculum that emphasizes three components: physical education, nutrition and mind/body.
"There's an epidemic of childhood obesity and there are also increasing rates of having to medicate children for psychiatric diseases such as ADD and depression," Hammond says. "I think that some of that is actually really preventable with the creation of the right kinds of habits from the very beginning."
Whitcombe and Hammond, who are mother and daughter, say they have been working on their dream school for 10 years now. They plan to grow the school to offer increasing grades each year, and offer cross-age groupings.
As the children mature, eventually they would like to have a service component to the program that involves travel abroad.
"We want to revise what school can be," Whitcombe says.
The way schools are structured now is a 19th century factory model, she says.
"Things need to be rethought for the 21st century that has so many variables nobody can predict them."
Children need to learn to be good problem-solvers, to work with all kinds of people, to understand different points of view, Whitcombe says.
"We as adults can't predict the problems this generation of kids is going to face. We need to create something that will foster kids to be flexible and smart, and to head out into the future to be leaders of the next generation."

— Reach Julie Rooney at (530) 747-8051 or jrooney@davis enterprise.net. Comment on this story at www.davisenterprise.com <http://www.davisenterprise.com>