On the last day of school each child came home with two important things. A memory box from the teachers, celebrating something important about the past year, and a letter that articulates the depth of each child’s achievement. Often children will focus on the memory box, but the letter is the most important part. We Read More >>
Children making and giving gifts
Every year children randomly are assigned another student to make a gift for. When they present their gifts they share an appreciation which explains why they made the gift. In the picture above a child is being presented with a handmade joke book. Other gifts included a board game about whales, a model of a Read More >>
New and Good
New and Good is a tradition at The New School. It was started in the 1970’s by Bob Newman, when he was the director of the Syracuse Institute for Enabling Education (the precursor) to The New School. It has worked effectively during all these years to merge affective education, pre-reading and early reading education. New Read More >>
St. Patrick’s Day Fun
Our leprechaun trap tradition was started many years ago by Dottie Mueller. Ever since the children spend two weeks creating inventive traps (the leprechauns say ingenious!) in the hope that those pesky leprechauns will come visit our school. So far we haven’t succeeded, but the leprechauns come, create mayhem, get stuck and unstuck in their Read More >>
Highland Forest Camping Trip October 2011
On October 6 the children at The New School set out to enjoy an overnight camping trip at Highland Forest. The weather was spectacular – blue skies, temperatures in the 70’s and yet there was a chill in the air during the night. The wood stoves in the cabins fixed that! On Thursday we hiked Read More >>
Gym
Gym time is an active time. We play lots of different games and split into all different types of groups. On this day, we had multi-age groups. One group played a tag game while the second group enjoyed playing with the parachute. We encourage kids to play safe, fair and hard in every type of Read More >>
Earth Day
Earth Day fell during April Break this year, so a week later we brainstormed ideas on what we could do to help care for the Earth. We came up with lots of ideas and ended up with students collecting trash, sweeping the parking lot, raking leaves, cleaning up flower beds and creating posters. We spent Read More >>
Sledding
Martin, a fifth grader, proposed a day of sledding at school. Teachers took his idea and made it a reality. During investigations the whole school took off to the golf course down the road for an afternoon of fun! When we returned, we had cookies (made at school by the children a few days earlier) Read More >>
Howard Gardner
This fall we wanted to generate a discussion based on Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences. We started off the discussion asking the question, “What do we mean by intelligence?” which led to an animated discussion about how everyone has strengths and weaknesses. We talked about how one goal of The New School is to Read More >>
Rooster Play
In early December the youngest children performed a play based on the Ancient Chinese story of how the rooster lost his horns. Ladies and Gentleman. We are glad you are here to watch our play. The play was a collaborative effort, with each child adding details until we told the story. The children spent weeks Read More >>