Lower School Student Life

Amy Jones,
Lower School Principal

Here in the Lower School we strike the balance between challenging children academically and respecting their need for play and socialization. We believe each teaching environment should foster the community values of respect, responsibility, kindness and care. Lower School teachers spend time with their classes creating communities that are safe for risk taking and learning, and representative of the children who live within them. In each homeroom there are pictures of families, spaces for student work and classroom “contracts” that reflect the behavioral expectations the class has decided upon together. Parents are often at school, helping to run our community service programs, acting as the “parent reader” of the week, or helping us out in the lunchroom. We believe children learn best when their own lives are not left at the door but are an integral part of the classroom. READ MORE

Fifth Graders are … working in literature circles. They are reading The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo; The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop; Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis; Crash by Jerry Spinelli; Number the Stars by Lois Lowry; and Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. Students work in small reading groups, providing them an opportunity to hone their critical thinking and discussion skills. Students are also working on an ecology unit. They are learning about what makes up an ecosystem, how living things get energy, how energy transfers in an ecosystem and how the three cycles of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water help the ecosystem survive.

Fourth Graders are … working on a group research project on the planets. They are putting together PowerPoint presentation to teach each other about our fascinating solar system. When that is complete, they will move on to their Earth Science unit, looking closely at the surface of the Earth. They will study different landforms and exciting, land-altering events such as earthquakes and volcanoes. Fourth graders are becoming true scientists using the Scientific Method and they will continue to practice these important steps of questioning and discovery as they experiment with erosion and rock identification.

Third Graders are … engrossed in a science unit on crime lab chemistry. They are learning how to be criminalists—one who studies crimes and analyzes clues in a systematic and scientific way. They have explored the intricacies of fingerprints by taking their own prints and devising their own method of classification. They then use this knowledge to solve “crimes” including a bank robbery and the theft of a famous piece of art from a museum. Third graders will also learn about chromatography, which is a system of separating mixtures. The crime lab chemistry unit draws upon student’s interest in and enthusiasm for solving mysteries while providing opportunities to practice important scientific concepts, methods and techniques.

Lower School Reading Challenge

• School librarian Michael-Anne Lowry and Lower School teacher Shannon Hieger introduced this year’s reading challenge—Reading: Your Ticket to Success. Each time a child finishes a book, he or she will earn a ticket that will be put into a fishbowl. Each month there will be drawings for free books and the tickets will be added to the “Wall of Tickets”—a fun way to keep track of the number of books read by the Lower School students.