Parent Step-Up Tours

This week we hosted two step-up tours for current parents. On Wednesday we had parents of current K-7 students; as luck would have it, all of the student from 2nd through 6th grade were doing math first thing on Wednesday morning! After the tour and faculty panel, the parent of a current 1st grade student pulled me aside to tell me the following story: When her group made it up to the 6th grade classroom, the teacher was called out of the room for 10 minutes. Without prompting, the student who has the Teacher's Aide position stood up and began class - reviewing the homework, and organizing the students to begin discussing the assigned reading. As the parent told me, "What could have been an utter disaster was instead an incredible moment."

On Thursday we had hosted 30 current ECC 4 families. Thursday's tour started with 40 minutes in the K/1 classrooms. In one, students were celebrating "cake day", and doing a variety of math and cooking activities. They created bingo charts, an activity that combined mathematics and literacy; they worked on separating three cakes into equal slices for 18 students; and they used color charts to design the color of the icing they wanted for their own cupcakes, before actually creating that icing and using it (and other toppings) to decorate their cupcakes. In the other classroom, students made a Y-chart (What does it sound like? Look like? Feel like?) about jazz while listening to Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, and then moved among several different stations to make art in response to different types of jazz.

After a tour of the rest of the classrooms, parents returned to the K/1 level for 30 minutes of conversation with the K/1 teachers, followed by 30 more minutes with a teacher panel of K-8 faculty. Questions ranged from "How do you address differentiation?" to "Are you happy teaching here?"