Seneca Valley Faculty District, Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle Faculty / CannonDesign
Textual content material description equipped by the architects. Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle Faculty is a finding out space that dares to find what can happen when finding out areas are designed further like youngsters’s museums. The consequence’s a totally new form of college that prompts finding out in every single place and affords faculty college students unparalleled firm to curate their educational journey. From the genesis of this problem, Seneca Valley Faculty District received down to find if PK12 environments could flip into further compelling, associated, collaborating, and worthwhile within the occasion that they emulated youngsters’s museums. The hope was this emulation would create a further rewarding and empowered finding out experience for school youngsters. There was clear recognition this is ready to require a departure from typical faculty buildings that are sometimes designed in methods by which dictate finding out.
To find a non-traditional faculty model, we might have appreciated to embrace ideas from new areas. Consequently, we partnered with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh to design a university infused with youngsters’s museum concepts. Would possibly a university be as thrilling to varsity college students as a youngsters’s museum? Would possibly it give them firm to map the course of their very personal educational journey? We believed the partnership would empower us to create an space further compelling, joyful, thrilling, and worthwhile for school youngsters.
Ehrman Crest is a developing that redefines finding out and makes it doable everywhere-in lecture rooms, positive, however moreover throughout the faculty’s corridors, outdoors areas, group finding out areas, alongside peg partitions, by the use of environmental graphics, and previous. As youngsters would experience in a museum, Ehrman Crest concurrently helps a lot of finding out modalities (seen, auditory, and kinesthetic). The faculty is infused with every digital and analog media and experiences. The areas emphasize and rejoice the tactic merely as rather a lot as a result of the product.
The faculty offers fluid programming and experiences that allow faculty college students to develop necessary pondering all by the developing. Faculty college students embark on academic and bodily journeys by the use of a sequence of porous environments—a room, collaboration space, work-in-progress area, or the surface—to coach choice in truly distinctive strategies.
At Ehrman Crest, faculty college students be taught by the use of explicit particular person instruction and group experiences. Each grade diploma is structured in communities along with lecture rooms, a collaborative area, and small-group instruction rooms. This format caters to the quite a few academic and emotional needs of students by creating adjoining areas for teachers and faculty college students to work together in one-on-one instruction and for school youngsters to work in groups. Even the youngest learners-kindergarteners have entry to these sources with custom-made choices like floor-level residence home windows that allow them to see train exterior their room.
Totally different important choices embody a photograph voltaic array, a sundial window, uncovered partitions to highlight developing supplies assemblies, flooring provides to stress gadgets of measure, and rather a lot further that turns the varsity proper right into a seemingly ever-evolving space that helps all a number of varieties of finding out.
