An Aside: Sound Mapping at The Cabin Path

On the last day of March and the first day of the fourth quarter at Hill Country Montessori School, the Elementary students all went to The Cabin Path. The Cabin Path is a lovely 50-acre island of forested paths that embraces, at its center, a tranquil lake. The site is named for an historic log cabin that had been carefully dismantled from its original site and rebuilt there, near the shore. The property includes a medicine wheel site, a labyrinth, and even a few longleaf pines. More about this entrancing spot in the future (indeed, I am planning one or two outings there as part of the 2009 workshop series). For now, I am writing about one particular experience there.

The older elementary students had finished an art project and were unfocused, maybe even a bit crazy. To help them slow down, I asked them to go off into the woods by themselves, find a comfortable place to sit for about half an hour, and listen. With plain white paper and a number two pencil, they were to make a "Sound Map" -- a map of all the sounds that they heard from that one spot, with the relative locations of each. I was amazed at how they were actually able to slow down and notice things, and I was equally stunned by all the sounds they experienced all around them. What a marvelous meditation -- a grounding in one's home place! I plan to assign this exercise in one of the Sense of Place workshops someday. Meanwhile, here are three of the maps that they drew:

Did this project make the students more calm and focused? Results there were far more equivocal, I'm afraid. Here is a picture of one of the boys in the group, shortly after he completed this exercise: