WESTHAMPTON — Dressed in snow pants, hats, mittens and red runny noses, Westhampton Elementary School fifth-graders walked to a northern branch of the Manhan River Friday morning for the final session of a course on hydrology and art.
“I think it’s about time that art and science come together,” said Todd Lynch, 43, a landscape architect who has taught the four-session workshop at Westhampton and at elementary schools in other communities. “Both of them really offer these wonderful gateways to understanding our world and making good choices for our ecosystems and understanding what is going on around us.”
Last Friday’s outdoor adventure was the culmination of the lessons, the first three of which were held in the classroom.
Students were instructed to create art with snow and materials found along the stream. While they played, they made connections to what they learned in the classroom about waterways; noticing how the river flows and freezes, seeing patterns, and incorporating it all into their works of art.
“It’s like, I get to adventure at school,” said 10-year-old Olivia Pease. “I do adventures in my backyard, but now I get to do one at school too.”
Dana Warren noticed when she peeled leaves off the ice, they left imprints like fossils. She wants to start a school paper about “ancient civilizations” and reach out to local museums for their expertise.
“It’s empowering for students to use their powers of observation and feel like they understand how systems work and then to put their own interpretation on it through their own artwork,” Lynch said.
A landscape designer and artist who sits on the Williamsburg Conservation Commission, Lynch is passionate about sharing his love of nature and the arts with young students. He studied art in college, then earned a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a specialty concentration in ecological design.
“The program was designed with several goals in mind,” Lynch said. “To give a students a root understanding of where and how water moves through the landscape, and an understanding of where they are in their own watershed.”
Earlier this year, he taught the first trial of the course to fifth- and sixth-graders at the Anne T. Dunphy School in Williamsburg with the help of a grant from the Williamsburg Cultural Council.
He applied for the grant in May, which required him to write lesson plans and a detailed description of the course. Prior to designing this curriculum, he taught students at the Hartsbrook School in Hadley about planting and landscape design.
Positive feedback from the course prompted Westhampton Elementary School’s fifth-grade teacher Sarah Moylan to ask him to teach the workshop to her class.
“Their response has been very enthusiastic, willing to try new things and willing to look at things in a different ways,” Moylan said.
Alyssa Colon-Garcia found a piece of tree bark and saw a canoe. She sent it down an open section of stream and watched it sink below the ice. Trial and error is a major part of the learning process, Lynch said.
“I see a lot of the students working in groups and collaborating,” Moylan said. “And I’m also noticing when they’re learning certain concepts, they’re making predictions and experimenting with information and checking to see if they’re right.”
After they completed the art projects, Lynch brought the students around to critique each other’s work.
“If you squeeze the berries, would the juice come out?” asked Dewey Hathaway while Warren presented her art made of red berries and ice. “Because you could dye the snow.”
Christopher Alexander made a small snowman with a fishing pole cast into the frozen stream. Beside him was a twig “mill house.” Lynch offered his critique.
“I think you were really smart to call this a mill house,” he said. “With a waterfall here and the placement of the structure, it shows you really understand how these waterways work.”
Kailee Roncone could not decide what to make. She tried a peacock, a soccer ball and a tree before settling on a vase filled with grass she picked.
While some students found peace in the creative process, others had a penchant for destruction. Elijah Pecard and Aidan Clifford built a tiny town of stacked twig structures on top the frozen waterway, while upstream, ice kept a small waterfall at bay.
“Destroy it!” Clifford shouted after their presentation.
“This is our performance act,” Pecard said, stomping on the frozen waterfall and flooding the town.
Before the final outdoor art-making session, Lynch met with the students three times in the classroom for different “experiential learning” exercises. Pouring water down a sheet of plexiglass to demonstrate how slope affects flow, mapping watersheds and classifying different types of streams with a collaborative, color-coded art project, students learned science disguised as play.
Moylan said the color-coded map, 25 feet long, hangs in the cafeteria for the school to see, making students proud of the work they accomplished. Lynch does not assign grades, but students are given an assessment at the end of the workshop to gauge their understanding of water systems, which is part of the standard fifth-grade curriculum.
“I think the best part is seeing them make connections to current events like Hurricane Irene and the massive rainfalls we get and how those affect water quality,” Lynch said.
Moylan said activities like these push back against the culture of media absorption that so many children fall victim to today.
Fifth-graders are not the only ones who learned from the experience either.
“I learned a lot about making space for art,” said Moylan. “They’re kids. The creativity is there. They already have it.”
Lynch says the course relates directly to the skills he learned as an artist and landscape designer, working with the land and understanding the ecology behind it. His latest art piece, “Plant Sketches,” is on display at Provisions in downtown Northampton. It’s a series of drawings created using only materials he cultivated in his own garden.
“Every time I do the program I learn something new,” Lynch said.
Sarah Robertson can be reached at srobertson@gazettenet.com