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Civil War Class Visits the Onondaga Historical Association

       The oldest group of students are taking part in a social studies unit looking at the causes and events leading up to the Civil War. This is a continuation of the Westward Expansion unit they completed last year. They have had remarkable discussions about what freedom is, what you can own and Read More >>

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Layers of the Earth

The youngest group of students has been learning about the layers of the earth.  We started off our unit by reading parts of Gail Gibbon’s bookPlanet Earth/Inside Out and How to Dig a Hole to the Otherside of the World by Faith McNulty.  As we learned about the many layers, we made small models out of clay and Read More >>

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Upper Case Printing

Working once a week with our youngest children, we have studied and learned how to form the capital letters A through E. While this sounds like a simple task, there are many things to consider. First of all where to start the letter? This is hard for some youngsters who are used to forming their Read More >>

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Native Americans and their Biomes

 We started our unit by studying physical maps of the United States. We also looked at and discussed maps that show climate, and precipitation. Then we studied the biomes of North America and compared their boundaries to the physical map.             After reading about each biome and sharing what each had to offer in terms Read More >>

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Highland Forest, October 2014

In many schools children are taken on camping field trips to celebrate the end of the year, as a reward you might say. At the New School we visit Highland Forest twice a year. The first time is scheduled near the start of school, and the second trip is within weeks of the end of Read More >>

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Westcott Cultural Fair

The Westcott Cultural Fair is always a festive way to begin our school year. This year, during Investigations, the children, expressing their love for books, created signs to carry . The titles of books they chose was wonderfully varied: Kensuke’s Kingdom, Private Peaceful, Cat Warriors, Blues Clues, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Diary of a Wimpy Read More >>

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James Pass Arboretum and our tree unit

The older students (ages 9 to 12) have embarked on a tree exploration. They started out looking at how trees grow – by observing their rings. We soon learned that not only can you tell how old a tree is by its rings, but you can also determine whether it was a “good” growing year Read More >>

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Multiplication and Division

Students in the middle grades have been working on division and multiplication using our TERC series of Investigations books.  We’ve explored the number chart with skip counting, played games like Tricky Triangles, written riddles for our classmates to solve and completed worksheets on arrays.  We even read and solved riddles from the book Each Orange Read More >>

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Glimpses of After School at The New School

APRIL We studied branches cut from a great variety of shrubs and trees, making drawings and labeling them as we thought about how they were different and how they were the same. In the following days we created nests, weaving the beautiful curly willow, red osier dogwood and other slim strands, wondering how the birds Read More >>

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Poetry: Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages,

Inspired by Lucy Calkins’ Poetry: Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages, the youngest children explored writing poetry. The unit starts with a poetry museum, which asks children to write about objects that have been collected. As each object is observed children are encouraged to see with poet’s eyes, to see the unusual in ordinary objects. As Read More >>