At a student’s suggestion the New School has decided to start a mini spelling bee. We have students at a variety of ages and levels testing their spelling skills every week. They are using words that come from the school’s sight words as well as the official spelling bee list. The students are going to Read More >>
Human Body Spring Unit
Our Human Body class has turned into an opportunity for the students to discover how much our body systems contribute to everything we do in life. After discussing the Nervous system, we moved on to the respiratory system, where the students were able to construct their own pair of lungs and actually see the connection Read More >>
Writing Workshop
Children in Kindergarten and First Grade participated in a writing class this spring where they “played” with words and pictures. They worked on rhyming, fact & opinion and writing descriptive sentences. Here are some examples of their writing.
Art Class with Ginger
At least twice a week, the kindergarteners and first graders have free art where they explore various mediums. We generally pull out at least two different mediums they can choose to work with such as acrylic paint, cardboard sculpture, playdough and modeling clay, watercolor paint, collage, chinese brush painting and pastels. We have been working Read More >>
Plant Class
Over the winter, we have been working in depth with plants. Topics included In class, we grew a bean plant from seed in dirt and a potato plant from a potato using water initially. We have recently planted the potato plant and its roots into a soil bag and will look for potatoes at the Read More >>
Soap and Bubbles
In March we started a unit called, Soap, Film and Bubbles where students are learning about surface tension, and the chemistry of soap and water. Students have done experiments with bubble clusters, where they made clusters of three and four and found different ways to make shapes. They learned about surface tension and were mainly Read More >>
Civil War
Our unit started with learning about the Triangle Trade route, and locating and identifying the countries and goods involved. We then studied how Africans brought to the New World were forced to participate in this trade through the Middle Passage. Students studied images of slave auctions using the Visual Thinking Strategies: What’s going on in Read More >>
Cubist Portraits
This project started in February with a slide show of Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraits. As always the children had amazing observations about color, geometric shapes and unusual perspectives. Each student then created his/her own cubist portrait, which was attached to their Valentine Bags.
Inventions
In January 2023 we started an Invention unit, inspired in part by the many inventions we learned about during our study of the Industrial Revolution. We started this unit by watching a few videos. Bill Nye always offers interesting and humorous videos on science topics. Then we watched videos that documented two recent real world Read More >>
Poetry
Inspired by the teaching of Kenneth Koch, and his brilliant books “Rose, Where did you get that Red” and “Wishes, Lies and Dreams,” our oldest students explored their poetic talents, some for the very first time. Each class began with a mini-lesson, which included reading and discussing poems written by other children on the topic. Read More >>