Crane Country Day School’s signature Lower School experience, Spring Study Week, kicked off Monday with 18 workshops inspired by the Renaissance world in which Leonardo da Vinci lived.

Kindergartners through fifth-graders participate in engaging workshops that bring the Renaissance to life through hands-on experiences.

These cross-grade workshops include studying inventions and making catapults, understanding the printing press, Renaissance dancing, pasta making, exploring artists’ style, astronomy, one-point perspective and frescos, lawn games, creating Venetian masks, inventing secret codes, basic Italian, testing parachutes and bridge building.

Teachers have taken on such personages of the Renaissance as Galileo, Vespucci, Gutenberg and Copernicus. Classrooms have transformed into artists’ studios, vibrant kitchens, printing shops, art museums and astronomers’ observatories.

Students visit all the workshops throughout the week, attend special assemblies highlighting important historical figures, and culminate the week with a Renaissance Faire.

Lower School Spring Study Week is an annual Crane tradition aimed to give students an opportunity to fully immerse themselves in a topic of study for an entire week. Past Spring Study Week themes have included Native Americans, Australia, Water, Imaginativity and Going Green.

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— Ann Pieramici represents Crane Country Day School.