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Calder’s Circus

Step Right Up! The whole school spent this fall learning about the circus. We read books like, You See a Circus, I see….” by Mike Downs, Peter Spier’s Circus, Circus by Lois Ehlert, Sandy’s Circus, The Giant of Seville and The World’s Greatest Elephant. The younger children watched an episode of Mr. Rogers: A day Read More >>

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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.

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Alphabet Books

Doug Dubois, father of Cyrus, introduced us to the fascinating work of MacArthur Fellow, Wendy Ewald who began fostering literacy via photography and storytelling with children in the 1970s. Together we decided to create an alphabet book, randomly assigning each child a letter of the alphabet. Doug and Leah came to our school multiple times Read More >>

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Art at The New School

Throughout the year children at The New School participate in school wide art projects. One of the first projects this year was “Cube Art” which used cardboard cubes, aka boxes. Each student decided on an overarching idea and drew a group of six related pictures. We then glued the pictures to the six faces of Read More >>

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Local History

Each child at The New School was given a replica of an old postcard of a Syracuse scene. Postcards showed parks, downtown scenes, and places of interest such as Oakwood Cemetery. Using VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) children were asked to look at the picture and describe what was happening, and what made them say that? Read More >>

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Systemic Racism

Our children, our students, live in a world that has developed all kinds of media and ways to transmit information, disinformation, ideas, and images.  They hear the media, adults, other peers talking about events and opinions as they move through their days.  Some of these ideas are exciting and innovative, others are darker and disturbing.  Read More >>

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Teaching and Learning through Games

Why do we play games?  What do they accomplish for teaching and learning? We have games for math, language arts, social studies, science and strategy.  We have games for inside and outside. We have cooperative and competitive games.  We have games we buy and we have many more games teachers and children have made. As Read More >>

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Rigamajig

A part of every afternoon at The New School is a time called Investigations.  During this hour children can choose between several activities:  art studio, construction materials, strategy games, or work on individually designed projects. For several years we have used Rigamajig, designed by Cas Holman of RISDE and represented by KABOOM, as a major Read More >>

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Kate Woodle, Children’s Book Illustrator

Kate Woodle conducted a four-week, illustration workshop for the seven oldest students. Kate kicked off her workshop as a Mystery Guest for the whole school, where she described the process of illustrating a children’s picture book. To the smaller class, students had to bring a fictional story they had written. Kate showed them how to Read More >>

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Making the World a Better Place

We spent the first half of the year being inspired by people like Ghandi, Wangari, and Malala, and their stories of how they made the world a better place. We listened to their stories. We also invited local activists who saw and responded to a need in our Syracuse Community. We met with inspirational people Read More >>