Belmont House of Living Culture Overview.

BHLC Grounds

Most of our days are spent outside under the shade of maple and oak trees, dancing out stories, painting our landscape, cooking and baking our own wholesome locally grown/organic snacks, singing songs and using hands-on creative and interactive games and natural artistic mediums to learn about the world around us and inspire a love of Geography, Geology, Biodiveristy, Science, Math, languages..and more.

You and your child will have the opportunity to shape their own outdoor play area, through simple caring work like: planting, watering and harvesting plants of fruits, vegetables and herbs, mixing cob with their feet and hands, build things, exploring the community, communing with friends while climbing trees, jumping rope, exploring water and other natural elements.

On the bus!

With a city bus stop just a block from our house, the city is ours for special field trips; downtown, to city parks and recreation areas, nature walks and other fun community events.

Rebekah Wostrel (Artist/Teacher)
MCGuffey Arts Center

Though we plan to spend as much time outside as possible, during inclement weather, super hot, stormy or cold days, our indoor space is a round, beautiful sunny natural yurt structure made from non-toxic wood and canvas. In our inside space, your children may enjoy putting together a puzzle with a friend, molding clay or bees wax into fun shapes, putting on a puppet show, exploring some musical instruments or many, many other fun indoor activities. Workspaces in both our inside and outside spaces will be rotated out regularly, based on seasonal themes and the core interest of the group. These sections will be well thought out and neatly organized spaces that naturally encourage focus, creativity, interactive play, fine and gross motor skill development, critical thinking and depth.

Music~Food~Language~Nature

Below you will find the four main pillars that comprise our philosophical mission for wanting to start a first preschool and now homeschool cooperative.  We are very much wanting to gather a small group of families who want to explore these areas and expand our knowledge and creativity in new and perhaps, unexpected directions.  What follows below is Estela's personal perspective on these topics, which illustrate an enthusiasm and passion which is broadly shared by the other members of the co-op.  These pillars represent what the Belmont House has been.  As we move forward, we expect that the community that evolves around this co-op will develop its own culture of ideas, perspectives and shared passions, and thus, our vision will evolve along with it. 

Music every morning.

~Music~

If there is a main component of the preschool, I would have to say it's music! Since early in life, music has always been a part of me. I hear it in my waking life and I write sound tracks to my dreams. I love music from all over the world and being able to share that with the children is by far the biggest motivator for me wanting to make this happen. A brief example of what I hope to accomplish is to expose the children to diverse rhythms and tonalities that are locally and globally traditional through interactive work stations such as gardening, mixing cob, making food, and harvesting fruits and vegetables. They will also have the opportunity to experience and experiment with diverse stringed and percussion instruments on a daily bases and explore other art forms such as theater, dance and circus arts, intertwined with musical elements as a part of formal and informal activities.  Dave and I both feel that art is such an important learning tool in life so we want very much to immerse our children in it, in community with other families who share that goal.

~Food~

When Dave and I were living in Latin America back in 2000, we began to really get into farmers markets and eating fresh, organic and locally grown whole foods. Since then, we have pretty much eliminated processed foods from our diet. Preparing our meals with our children is a ritual that we enjoy everyday. We hope to encourage in them at an early age the love of planting, cultivating, harvesting and preparing their own meals. This is why food is one of the main components of our mission. Children will be involved on a daily basis in the preparation of their own snacks and eventually we hope that some will be left over for them to take home. An example of what we have in mind is: I just recently had a chat with the owner of Wade's Mill, in Rockbridge County, about selling us some whole organic corn so that we can begin experimenting with making our own fresh corn tortillas, with the help of the children. We hope to perfect this endeavor and be the first C'villians to make our own organic masa from local Virginia corn!  So for you parents who find cooking also a passion PLEASE jump right in so we can cultivate the palates of our little ones!!!!!

~Language~

Now about Language! I am likely the first Mexilachian gal of the Blue Ridge, or at least as far a I know. My mother is from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and my father is from Luray, Virginia. I grew up in the Shenandoah valley Spanish/English bilingual, surrounded by a host of Mexican and American cousins, uncles and aunts, singing rancheros and bluegrass, tejano and country. Being Spanish/English bi-lingual has afforded me so many deep and profound experiences and opportunities in my world travels. Not to mention it is the second most commonly spoken language in the U.S., arguably making it one of the most useful languages to learn. This is why I feel that offering the children exposure to Spanish in parallel to English on a daily basis is important. The Spanish language will also be infused into our daily routines, through circle time in the morning and during play time as well, through songs, books and fun movement activities. My inspiration is that through exposing our children to two languages, we will be setting them up not just cognitively to absorb languages in general, but to also introduce to them the idea that we share this planet with other people in the world who have rituals and traditions that are very similar or different from their own. Again parents if language/s is/are your thing, we encourage you to join us in shaping this goal.

~Nature~

Nature provides the most perfect classroom. It alone has inspired math, science, history, geography and literature. The great outdoors is a child’s greatest teacher and their dearest friend. We strongly believe that children should spend most of their day outside playing with bugs, watching and chasing birds and squirrels, playing with rocks, sticks, mud, natural plasters and pigments, sand, water, making bricks, piling log slices. Building structures with cob, straw and basic stick frames. Buckets, rakes, shovels, seed collecting, gardening, planting and harvesting of fruits, vegetables, flowers, trees. Swinging, climbing, tumbling, running, skipping, jumping. Getting ‘really’ dirty, yes, dirty, like a real kid should! This is why our primary classroom (weather permitting) will be outdoors.

Bike Parade during bike week.

Mixing cob with our feet!

How is the school structured?

This will be our second year as a cooperative:  This upcoming year Shelly Stern will be acting as our consistent (lead) teacher, meaning the person who will carry the children through the daily rituals. The co-teacher will be a co-oping parent in rotation depending on how many families sign up for the program.  We will be meeting at the end of May and again in August to discuss our time commitment schedule, themes and activities that we will be using throughout the year and anything else we need to discuss. We have a maximum of 8 children per day including our own children. We prefer for those children to be 2 days per week, but are open to a one or two day option for those homeschooling families who live out of town or have other commitments. We operate along a standard calendar year, with school starting the 4th of September and ending the 30th of May 2014. We take a break for Thanksgiving and the Christmas/New Year Holiday, and for spring break the week before Easter. We have a couple of family picnics and fun shows mixed into the year. Our day begins at 8:45 a.m. and ends at 12:45 pm (Monday and Tuesday).  Families are encouraged to prepare a healthy lunch focusing on whole foods. We ask that families refrain from including any sugary snacks or treats please.  

As much as we would like to, we are not able to accommodate children with severe peanut or tree nut allergies.

Lead Teacher Shelly Stern

Shelly Stern has worked as a camp counselor, mentor, teacher and childcare provider for over 15 years. She is a veteran homeschooling mother, gardener, artist, and bicyclist who enjoys fostering a greater sense of community through play. She has worked with me at BHLC this past two year and Shelly is a wealth of knowledge, a great community resource, a fantastic communicator and has been a fabulous influence on my children as well as all of the children who have passes through our doors.

Here is how Shelly describes her self:

I share plants, barter, organize games and projects for kids, I teach parent and me nature classes. I volunteered at a local preschool this year-- delighting in smashed tile mosaics, walks around town, and field trips to local places of interest.... I swing in hammocks, ride bikes, organize parades for the fun of it. I pick strawberries and give some to the neighbors, I try to teach myself banjo, I encourage my son to explore stilt walking and unicycling...
I am the coordinator for kids bike education at Community Bikes, I helped with the QCC farms 4-h club bike rides around town, I am on our neighborhood association board, I work for peace, I try to listen to my intuition, the seasons....

The indoor space

Our primary indoor studio space where we will continue our magical play on days of inclement weather is a beautifully constructed, round natural structure called a yurt. A Yurt is an adaptation of a traditional Mongolian housing structure, made with a wooden lattice frame covered with waterproofed canvas and nylon. It is a light and airy structure. Ours sits on a beautiful rustic walnut floor and is nestled amid towering maple trees. We LOVE yurts.  Their roundness offers a flowing breathable peace to the day that we feel will keep the kids connected to nature and the directions of the seasons. Some have asked us: how is it heated? The space is heated and cooled by a ductless allergy free Mitsubishi unit sized for our space.

For the past two years we have focused on the seasons, our local farmers, plants, animals and insects of our region. This has been taught through music and other performance arts. To give you an idea of what the inside space is/will be equipped with, here are some examples of stations that have been available in various combinations throughout the years based on themes that we were working on for a particular season: Dress up, wooden blocks, puzzles, books, puppetry, interactive games, kitchen/city market section with money exchange booth, arts and crafts table, interactive science table (i.e. shells, insects, flowers/plants, rocks, dirt), musical instruments, small stage area.

Your child will receive small group and individual attention as needed in developing the following: Social skills development, small and gross motor skill manipulation activities, tools to build cognitive and language skills, i.e. Letters, numbers, shapes, color matching games. We believe that it is crucial for children to be exposed to as many experiences as possible by interacting with real tools, food, instruments and people so we will bring in or take trips out in the community so that they may understand how the world around them works!

Enrollment Options and Rates.

These rates are for the full year. A signed commitment and deposit are required to reserve a space for your child. Please feel free to contact us at any time if you have any questions or would like to schedule a visit. Contact: Estela Knott (Organizer) at 434-293-6361 or 434-242-8488.

Note:

We suggest scheduling a visit with us and encourage a few drop in sessions to get a feel for our daily rituals and activities. Once you have decided whether our environment and core values fit with what you envision for your child and family, let me know and I can send you a copy of our commitment agreement and we can go from there. Schedule options and rates are below:

Yearly Tuition and hours of operation for the calendar year of 2013/14:

(We are on a Monday and Tuesday schedule from 8:30 am to 12:30pm).

2days= $1084 (72 days)

1day= $542 (36 days)

Nutrition and the Small Child

A Content Gardener

There is nothing more satisfying to a small child than to enjoy the fruits of their work. When it comes to food, we strive to eat food that is mostly organic or locally grown and definitely unprocessed and without any refined or chemical sugars. We strive towards balanced and truly healthy snacking and we are very open to the ideas and suggestions of the community. One thing that is very important is to instill an understanding of the whole food cycle, from planting the food to its harvest, preparation and consumption. The preparation of food will be very central to our daily routine, and will also be a main inspiration for the creative endeavors of the children, as we invent songs and dances to honor and celebrate the agricultural cycle and our place in it.

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child? ~Lin Yutang

Cob and Natural Building Materials

This is a picture from the mountains outside of Santa Barbara, at Spirit Pine Ranch, where our friends Betty and Tautacho live and teach workshops in natural building techniques. This is a house made of cob, which is a traditional adobe like building material that can be easily mixed, even by small children using rough sand, clay, straw and water. It is amazing and fun material to build with and play with. It is made by stomping and dancing with your feet until the ingredients are blended together. A wonderful way to teach pre-academic science concepts is through the study and use of natural building materials, including cob, earth, natural plasters and pigments, reclaimed wood and stone. Also, the rhythmic nature of the process of creating cob opens up all kinds of musical group dance opportunities.

Son Jarocho in the preschool curriculum

This is our dear friend Pablo Campechano Gorgonio, of Santiago Tuxtla in Veracruz state, Mexico. He is the maker of our son jarocho instruments and is a wonderful teacher, singer and guardian of his roots culture. This is at a fandango in his town. Son Jarocho is a Mexican folk music style with its own family of instruments, which features zapateado (foot dancing) as the main percussion instrument, improvised call and response vocals and is notable for being a very inclusive musical culture which is easily accessible for little children. The little girl in the foreground is waiting for her turn to hop up on stage and dance. When I was first introduced to Son Jarocho it reminded me so much of the music I performed as a child growing up in the Shenandoah Valley in Luray, Va. I used to be part of a couple of clogging groups. We would perform on Skyline Drive a few times a year for tourists and for festivals and local celebrations. Every culture has it's folk traditions. Though the rhythms are somewhat different, the form is the same, a family of folk instruments, free style verse improvisation, foot percussion and traditional garb. Over the years, I have learned various styles of clogging, tapping, stepping, Zapateado (Mexico) and Zapateo (Peru). We plan to introduce some of these basic foot work styles and rhythms to the children.

La Tarumba and Chebo Ballumbrosio

This is a photo of Chebo and I and the children that I worked with at La Tarumba in Lima, Peru during the summer of 2001. La Tarumba is one of my main inspirations for starting our school. Since that summer, I have dreamed of manifesting a school or a Casa De Cultura (house of culture) like this. La Tarumba teaches children PreK into adulthood through classes and workshops in music, theatre, dance and circus arts. During the summer in a rotating schedule, the kids participate in all of these activities and at the end there is a grand performance that combines all that they have learned. Ah, I must tell you about Chebo Ballumbrosio! Chebo is an accomplished Afro-Peruvian percussionist and dancer who carries the tradition of his people from Chincha Del Carmen, Peru. I have learned so much about music from this amazing man. He was the first person that introduced me to using my body as a percussion instrument. Mine and Chebo's relationship started off with me taking percussion lessons from him and then we discovered that his fancy footwork (Zapateo) and my traditional fancy footwork (clogging and tap) were not really all that different from one another! I learned so much about the impact of cross-cultural exchange that year! Aside from music and dance Chebo is also an amazing clown, painter and chef.

This is Estela and Dave B. preparing Kung Pao Seitan at La Casa del Pan in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. This was a restaurant that we performed at every night when we were living there and we volunteered to be guest chefs to celebrate the week of their 7th anniversary. It was so great to get to know the local markets and food system there and share our own passion for creative organic cooking with the cooking staff at the restaurant and the members of the San Cristobal community. We made about 90 plates of food and raised 80% of the money in that one night to build a school building for indigenous kids in one of the mountain villages nearby.

Interviev with Estela Peredes, Director of La Tarumba Circus School on the Relationship between the Arts and Culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toveyOQM_pk

Here is a clip of an interview I did with Estela Peredes, the director of La Tarumba, an innovative Circus school in Lima, Peru that I worked at in 2001. We were introduced to Estela P and La Tarumba http://latarumba.com/ingles/escuela.htm by our good friend Lucho Mena. This magical place is the primary inspiration for our school project. It is a circus, music and theatre school for children and young adults three and up. I could curtainly write a book about how amazing and wonderful this school is. It changed my life and the way in which I view early childhood education. This clip is just one piece of a long conversation that I had with Estela P about the history of La Tarumba and her perspective regarding the importance of the arts and cross cultural exchange and how they influence culture.

Our Permaculture plan for BHLC

What you see here is a permaculture landscape plan for the backyard, created for us by Christine Muehlman Gyovai, of the Blue Ridge Permaculture Network. It is a presentation of the plant beds and their contents, as well as play areas and the location of the yurt and the cob playhouse, which the children will help build. If you click on the graphic and zoom in, you will see the tremendous amount of detail in the drawing. On this plan, you will finds areas of berries and medicinal and kitchen herbs, vegetable patches, and fruit trees. It is our hope that the children will participate regularly with the planting and nurturing of these beds, as the plants grow and their fruits become part of their snacks, their songs, and dances.