The Lake and Park School

In naming this blog The Ampersand, we refer to the symbol that abbreviates the “and” into one icon, and to what is discussed below in terms of the school’s name.  It is our hope that the blog will allow us to find a way to step back from the daily work that we and the children are doing and position it in such a way—through still photo, video clip, child’s painting, child’s spoken and written word, teacher commentary, outside expert commentary, etc., in order to offer an inside look to parents and others whom we choose to share the material with.   

In choosing the name for The Lake and Park School, I wanted to emphasize two concrete aspects of our environs that are a prominent part of the school experience.  The location of the school on the beautifully appointed Hunter Boulevard is one.  As part of the Olmsted Parks Legacy, our locale is decidedly not a rural one; rather it is that of a planned human influence on the landscape—a park in the urban sense, albeit designed to bring the wild into the city.  We are definitely a school in a city; our fortunate place within that city is one where the park system defines the neighborhood.

The neighborhood exists in one area of the shoreline of Lake Washington.  We have ease of access to the lakefront and make it a frequent place of exploration.  The children dig in the sand, search the water and sky for bird and animal life, pick up beach glass and rocks and use water as a natural medium for play.   As we return to the same shore month after month, we experience a familiar setting in a variety of conditions, and begin to establish a sense of our place in the natural world. The simplicity of the name evokes two concrete aspects of the child’s world—water, earth.  By mention of the concrete it draws attention to the fact that the child learns first from interaction with the stuff of the real world.  In our classrooms, we may go beyond the concrete to the symbolic and abstract, but we do so, even in the older grades, by referring back to the concrete.  Thus the classrooms are outfitted with real materials and children work with real tools as they explore those materials.

Perhaps most importantly to my thinking, The Lake and Park School deliberately echoes the name of Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s The City and Country School,  begun in 1914, still in existence in New York.  It was started by Carolyn Pratt, a progressive educator who invented the unit building block, a staple of our classrooms here, and was renamed after the school expanded into two locations in order to allow children the opportunity to explore distinct aspects of the modern world.  Our school’s name pays tribute to this legacy in seeking to understand  all that went on during the progressive era in American education, as well as to our intent to maintain that heritage.

Camille Hayward