Liz & Meridith's Class
Just before the Winter Break we had a cozy, fun pajama day. Several children proclaimed that it was the “best day of their lives.” We loved having the campus all to ourselves and playing hide-and-seek. We sang the Magic Penny song, read Roses are Pink Your Feet Really Stink, and exchanged Valentine’s Day cards. The children have formed strong friendships and we all have so much fun together.
Along with the friendships that are growing and the connection that the children feel to the overall school environment, we are also observing children diving in and taking academic challenges in all areas of the classroom.
In the Geography area this month we turned our focus to Asia and on the 5th of February we celebrated Chinese New Year with a dragon parade throughout the campus. It’s a wonderful tradition and as we parade the older children remember the good old days when they were young and a part of the dragon. In the Science area we are learning about land and water forms. We can look out our window to identify Cayuga Lake and use the continent map of Asia to identify everything from an archipelago to an isthmus.
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Virginia & Leah's Class
Where January seemed quite endless, February passed by in a blink! Despite the rapidity of February, we are definitely experiencing some cabin fever. The one ‘warm’ sunny day we had in February, we just stood outside our classroom door, closed our eyes, and tilted our faces toward the sun. It was such a tease, and a most needed intermission. If only it was a week long intermission!
The recent break demonstrated the joy we all share here at EAC. As children came back into the classroom and saw each other again, the smiles and enthusiasm filled the space for hours! We feel so lucky to share our days with such an amazing group of growing humans.
For Chinese New Year, we anticipated Extended Day's Dragon Parade and worked together in our afternoon class to peel, chop, mix, scoop, fold, and enjoy some delicious dumplings! They are always quite the crowd pleaser and we recommend you try them at home for a family cooking project!
We’ve been studying land and water forms and exploring different parts of geology, the layers of the earth, and our local environment. We’re becoming familiar with our home Ithaca, and the Earth, before we suit up and journey into outer space! It’s one of our most loved science units. If any of you have a particular interest in space or planetary studies, please let us know and we can set up a time for you to come in and share!
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Donyan & Becca's Class
The children were excited to be back from February break to be with their friends and they were also met with a surprise - many new works on the shelves. We have transitioned to studying Asia. We will be focusing on animals and geography, learning songs, and many other activities.
Our classroom has been busy with physical science experiments and explorations, including magnetic/nonmagnetic, light refracting/reflecting, balance exploration, and testing objects for buoyancy. The children love to make predictions and then test them out!
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Dawn & Katri’s Class
Welcome back to school after what was hopefully a healthy, restful break. The children are getting back into the swing of our normal routine, starting the day with spelling, practicing math facts and making a plan of three works to focus on for the morning work time. Addition and multiplication facts are getting quicker the more we practice! Feel free to quiz your kids in the car!
As the days get longer, time and history are part of our focus. The bears are learning about how the clock works. Tigers and Lions are practicing their skills telling time with an analog clock. We are looking at the invention of timelines to organize events in history. Some of us are practicing matching years to the centuries, both AD/BC and CE/BCE. We are looking at how written language has developed over the centuries. We are looking back even farther to the beginnings of our Earth on the Clock of Eons.
We are juggling numbers in so many ways. We are calculating with word problems, adding and subtracting fractions, learning the algorithm for long division, trying our hands at long multiplication with one and two digits and even doing a bit of beginning algebra.
Writing is happening in all areas of study. Letters to old friends, invitations for lunch, and retelling of stories in history. Children are investigating their favorite animals while doing long and short research papers. Our Picturing Writing stories are taking shape. Children are painting their illustrations after mapping out the storylines on their story boards. The excitement about building characters, describing settings and developing interesting plots is alive and well.
Listening to stories never gets old. The children have fallen in love with the characters of Catwings by Ursula K. LeGuin. We have read the first three books of the series. We leave the rest for children to find on their own and are moving on to, Front Desk by Kelly Yang, a recommendation by Phoebe and Veena. In addition to reading aloud to the class, our smaller literature groups are practicing reading with interpretation, and deepening our understanding of what we read with different comprehension strategies.
Your children are peacemakers for sure as they grapple with how to make the world a better place. The most recent topics in our Anti-bias curriculum have been about the difference between dislikes and prejudice and how prejudice leads to discrimination.
In Spanish this week, your kids were able to go shopping at a mercado Espanol. How great it is to see our children using Spanish!
We look forward to talking with each of you about your wonderful children at our upcoming conferences. See you soon.
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Deb & Becky's Class
February is a short, but busy, month filled with lessons, work time, celebrations and a week-long break. The children are finding it very satisfying to look back at the work they’ve completed since the beginning of the year and see the progress they’ve made in their daily spelling and math exercises. All the children have solved math problems in all four operations using materials ranging from very concrete to doing the process abstractly. This class has a unique characteristic of not being satisfied with regular four or five digit problems but insist on creating division problems with dividends so large that they have to glue multiple pieces of paper together to accommodate the size of the problems. They can’t seem to get enough! Besides practicing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, some children have also been introduced to fractions, multiples, decimals and measuring angles. Other children are practicing with money, solving word problems and telling time. This is a very busy time!
In Science and History, the children are doing experiments that relate to the laws of nature and examining them on how they relate to the evolution of our planet. In Biology the children are beginning to explore the evolution of life forms, starting with prokaryotes, protoctistas and fungi. In Geography the children were introduced to the layers of the earth and atmosphere, parts of a volcano and land and water forms. All cultural lessons are intended to give children a broader understanding and appreciation for our precious planet and all life that it supports.
Valentines Day was a busy day. We started the day by going to The Rink and ice skating. It was great watching the novice skaters brave the ice, while the more experienced skaters twirled and danced around. By the time we got back to school, we had worked up quite an appetite. After lunch, we all gathered in the gym for our annual Jump for Heart celebration. It was wonderful seeing children skipping rope, jumping hurdles and using hula hoops. The skills were varied, but the enthusiasm was not. Everyone did their best and had a great time.
Finally, we returned to our class and handed out valentines cards. It was obvious that the children had given their card giving a lot of thought and were pleased to give out and receive messages of love and appreciation. The event was topped off by a surprise package from Navaz, a fellow student, who is spending a sabbatical semester in Connecticut. The children were delighted to hear from her, and receive her handmade messages. We are looking forward to her return in June.
Spring is just around the corner, and we are looking forward to warmer days. In the meantime though, we still need to bundle up to go outside. Snow pants are used on cold, and wet and muddy days. Please make sure your child has a pair at school, even when the temperatures rise.
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Melani & Sophia's Class
February is flying by, and we are excited to be back together after a restful and refreshing winter recess. Our Valentine’s day experience of skating and Jump for Heart was a rousing success. It was a day to encourage and appreciate each other, as children practiced the challenging skills of skating and jumping rope. This led to a wonderful discussion in our classroom about the five most important words in friendly competition: “I am happy for you!”
Our history studies are expanding in all directions, as children investigate the layers of the earth, the layers of the atmosphere, and the evolution of first life on earth. The Archean and Proterozoic eons offer rich material for studying tectonic plates, volcanoes, and simple cells. We have touched on the symbiotic relationship between plant and animal cells, and will continue looking into photosynthesis, oxygen production, and the coming of multicellular organisms.
Children have become familiar with the classroom science area, and are now able to complete physical science experiments independently. Some favorites this month have been, Heavy Things Sink, Chemical Reaction, Elasticity, Evaporation, and Liquid to Solid. These experiments expose students to the scientific method, and offer them a chance to practice writing up their own observations. In biology, children continue to gain mastery of the internal and external parts of the five classes of vertebrates, and to work with classification charts of the five kingdoms of life.
Hands on math materials are all over the classroom, as children work with multiplication on the Checkerboard and the Bank Game, division on the Test Tubes, and addition and subtraction on the Stamp Game and the Golden Mat. When children gain mastery of a material they will continue to practice their skills abstractly on paper. Children are also enjoying mental math, estimation, and word problems. Small group work offers an opportunity for juicy mathematical conversations, and verbal problem solving.
We look forward to seeing families at Parent Teacher conferences next month!
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Upper Level
Whether by foot or by bus, springtime for Upper Level means moving out into the community.
This week, on Friday, the First Year students will travel to the Clemens Center in Elmira to view a production of Freedom Bound, the story of enslaved people in Ohio and their experiences on the Underground Railroad. Additionally, on Monday, they will take a walking tour of the South Side Loop led by Professor Nia Nunn of Ithaca College. They will learn about Freedom Schools, black history and black leaders here in our own community. These community experiences are part of the First Year students’ curriculum on African American History.
All students are busy with their Community Service experiences this semester. As we move closer to the Book Sale, the First Years will be signing up to volunteer to read picture books to students in the Primary and Extended Day classes. Delight is the word that best describes this connection as Upper Level students joyfully read to their younger buddies. Many love to continue reading past the two weeks set up for this community service.
The second group of Second Year students will be serving Pizza Lunch in the Junior Level and Primary/Extended Day classes for the remainder of the year. And finally, our Third year students continue their Friday volunteer work at the Food Donation Network and lunch experiences at Loaves and Fishes.
At the end of January, we held our annual Big Trip Meeting for parents. In May, we will board two Swartout buses to travel on our 4 day trip to Boston and Plymouth. The students will participate in activities, learning about the roots of American history as seen through the eyes of the Europeans, African Americans and Native communities in the 17th and 18th centuries. Medical papers from our nurse and insurance forms will be sent home this week. These can also be found on line. We have had many, many parents volunteer to act as chaperones, making this adventure possible. Thank you!
Our research project has moved from the information gathering phase to the outline and report writing. First drafts are due on March 8.
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Middle School
Every other year, the Middle School has embarked on a study of a Shakespeare play. Two years ago, we had a great time studying and producing As You Like It. This year we’re taking on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Through our Humanities curriculum, everyone is involved in reading and exploring the play, getting to know its characters, their quirks and possible motivations, and beginning to get Shakespeare’s language on our ears...and tongues. Reading the play has generally been a collaborative activity in which students read aloud in relatively small groups, take turns playing roles and doing and redoing short scenes multiple times to get a sense of how it can be played. Emphasis is placed on bringing the printed word to life… To that end, we’ve been using the Folger Library’s Shakespeare Set Free, which, conveniently, has a section devoted to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As we’ve read, we’ve also watched several excerpts of versions of the play to appreciate how others have interpreted it. That has been especially useful and has given students a basis for both deepening their understanding and challenging/questioning their first readings.
We started our study with Act I Scene 2, which introduces the play’s comic characters, the well-known Bottom and his comrades Quince, Snug and others. Students enjoyed getting to know these characters, especially the enthused and boastful Bottom, as they are assigned their own roles for a play they’ll perform for the soon-to-be-wed Duke of Athens. On close reading of just a few pages of the play, students began uncovering the possibilities for how these characters know each other, how who’s in charge and what to make of Bottom especially. Small group readings became increasingly spirited and funny as students came to know the scene. Against that experience, students found watching Kevin Kline as Bottom in the 1999 screen version of the play quite interesting. Not the overly-enthused character they’d been hamming it up to be, students saw less farce and more humanity in Kline’s depiction.
Adding interest and scope to our work, we were recently treated to a very special visit by Professor David Kramer (Ella’s dad!) who came in to share his scholarship and passion for Shakespeare. Professor Kramer gave a fascinating talk about Shakespeare’s life and times, his family and upbringing and especially his London audience, and led a lively discussion of several passages of the play. This background has already provided the class useful insights as we continue getting to know the play.
We’ll continue a close study of the play and then turn our attention to bringing the play to life. In the coming weeks, student directors will be elected, auditions and casting will occur, sets and costumes will be designed and created, a program and other media will be made and we’ll put on afternoon and evening performances in the ABR Center. More theater workshop than your traditional middle school theater production, everyone will play a role of some sort in the creative and highly collaborative project. Should be fun!
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CALLING ALL ALUMS!
Let us know what you’ve been up to by contacting Director of Marketing and Communications, Wendy Houseworth.
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