Site/Garden Day Thank You!

Many thanks to the awesome parents and kids who showed up today to help weed and prune the K/1 playscape: Megan, Abby and Myles, Steen, Evie and Will, Lauren and Daniel, Jon and Elliot, Jeanine and Liza, and Jean.

Walk-a-thon Touchpoints Column

Being in community with our fellows and offering kindness and service is happening in classrooms all over TBS. Every Thursday this year, kids go to the Chaparral House in Extended Day to visit with the residents. Students in Sweet Briar Creek have been going to The Women’s and Children’s Daytime Drop-in Center on Acton St. for years with deliveries of songs, feasts, and handmade student gifts. Temescal Creek has an annual food drive for The Alameda Food Bank, while Laurel Creek has a student-derived project of community service (such as this year’s Penny Drive). The list goes on.

This year, we wanted to add a specific educational component to our community service efforts, as well as to do something on a school-wide level. To help us do this, we drew on the concept of service learning, which is a multi-step, action-oriented experience that focuses equally on the service being provided and the learning that is happening for those taking action, benefiting both the provider and the recipient of the service.  In this way, it is different from community service, which may not have an educational component.

We began by convening a council of student representatives from across all grade levels in January, and explained our goals. The students then dreamt up the idea of the Walk-a-thon, a learning experience that would culminate in an all-day service event. Council members listened closely to their classmates’ ideas, and walked them through a process to help each classroom pick a charity or organization to support.  Final selections included The Berkeley Free Clinic, What If? Foundation, Seva, AISCS (Karibu), Children’s Hospital of Oakland, Meca, Red Cross, and Rainforest Action Network. Representatives from each beneficiary organization then came to speak to the elementary classes about the work that they do, and students worked hard to raise donations from friends, family, and neighbors.

From making t-shirts and banners in art class over the last two weeks, to the cheering crowds of our youngest students who greeted K-8 students at the ECC, to the inspirational leadership of the student council members, yesterday’s event embodied the promise and potential of the TBS educational model. The Walk-a-thon brought a generation of ideas about community and what it means to be a brother or sister with people in our own backyard, as well as our fellows all over the world. It was a chance for students, teachers, administrators and parents to work hard in support of our core beliefs and values.

(This column was co-authored by Kate Klaire, our Social Facilitator and faculty advisor to the Student Council, who was a central figure in the Walk-a-thon's success).

We Walk Because We Care

Our first ever Walk-a-thon was a smash success yesterday! Many thanks to all the parent volunteers who helped out (too many for me to name). Enjoy these photos from the event.

Students painting one of the many banners we carried.

Students silk screening t-shirts with the Walk-a-thon logo.

T-shirts laid out in Cerrito Creek for students to wear.

Mitch rallies the students at an assembly prior to our departure.

The assembled students.

Members of the student council address the crowd.

Kate and Chris lead us in If I Had A Hammer, with student accompaniment!

Sweet Briar Creek class poses with a banner before they depart.

And we're off!

A troupe of parents from Laurel Creek made a surprise appearance to cheer us on.

We refueled and quench our thirst at a snack station halfway up the Ohlone Greenway.

Nancy and Andrea help greet us upon arrival at the ECC.

The ECC laid out a path for K-8 students to walk around the campus.

ECC students passed out hand-made lemonade. 

Many middle school students were excited to revisit their preschool site.

Feeling the love!

Back down the greenway, to our lunch spot.

A game of pepper.

One of the best parts of the day, for me, was seeing kids from Kindergarten through 8th grade playing and hanging out together during lunch. 

Mission Moments Newsletter #4

As always, it's a genuine web exclusive available just to you, dear reader - the latest installment of the Mission Moments newsletter! Enjoy reading about the incredible teaching and learning happening in the elementary division at TBS.

Scenes from today's classrooms

Blackberry Creek (K/1) & Cerrito Creek (4/5) - During buddy time, students were doing collaborative drawings; each piece of paper was divided into quadrants, and each buddy needed to contribute some drawing to each quadrant. This helps students practice skills of interdependency and creativity.

Laurel Creek (K/1) - Water Day, with a variety of water-related games such as Sponge Dodgeball and Water Balloon Toss. This was a student-selected "holiday", a tradition in our K/1 program that replaces simple birthday celebrations with activities and events that help children learn about each other's interests. 

Sweet Briar Creek (2/3) - During math workshop, students used Hundreds Boards to see the patterns created by doing "Multiples of" work, puzzled through logic problems, compared fractions using Montessori fraction tiles, and watched a Kahn Academy video showing what's actually happening during the standard algorithm for subtraction.

Temescal Creek (2/3) - During a writing workshop, students worked on taking notes for the Informational Texts they are creating. They consulted research sources and wrote their notes into graphic organizers preloaded with questions around topics including diet, interactions, lifespan, anatomy, and habitat.

Strawberry Creek (4/5) - Student worked on painting props, backdrops and staging for their end-of-year performance of understanding about California history, coming up next Wednesday.






Bonus: Video of Sweet Briar Creek practicing If I Had A Hammer

Division Head Assessment Device

The various assessment tools that I distributed as part of my NAIS Fellowship of Aspiring Heads were hugely helpful in identifying areas of professional and personal growth to focus upon this year. And, one of the ways I identified to measure improvement in my work towards those goals - improving my communication, recognizing what's right, improving my EQ, and improving my leadership of meetings - was by having the 21 faculty and staff I supervise assess me on these (and other) areas of my leadership.

To create this tool, I asked members of my Fellowship cohort to send me any devices they used, and reviewed the collected examples for categories and approaches. I then took one I liked especially, and edited it to better fit my precise scenario. One important change, helpfully suggested by Mitch  (our Head of School), was to use the language of progress reports and assessments that we use with children - mastering, effective, competent, developing, and emerging.

The device has six sections: a mission-based approach, division administration, work with individuals and teams, curriculum and instruction, personal leadership characteristics, and open-ended responses. You can click here to see the assessment device. My plan is to gather this data over the next few weeks, aggregate and analyze it for patterns and narrative threads, and then present those findings, and some targeted professional and personal development goals for next year that arise from those findings, at a faculty meeting during our work week in June.

Thinking and Linking About Learning Outcomes

I've started a collection of links to news and research articles that somehow relate to our school-wide learning outcomes. Enjoy!

Autonomy
Structures that help students engage in learning
Promoting autonomy in learners

Interdependence
Digital citizenship
Social/emotional learning

Critical Thinking
Culturally responsive instruction
Build curiosity via student questions
The importance of critical thinking

Creativity
Cultivating creativity
Teaching creativity
Expanding concepts of art

Communication
Fighting to save sea lions

Technological proficiency
Kids produce a TV show
Ipads in Kindergarten
Games as instructional devices
50 uses for the iPad in the classroom
Taking a break from tech
Using tech to do research
Tech in the classroom

Health and Wellness
Gardening at school
Beating obesity
Bake sales and obesity
Fit children score better on standardized tests
Jumping rope for fun and fitness
Lifetime fitness classes
Eating right
School staff modeling health
HealthTeacher.Com
Vitamin deficiencies
Body image
Obesity and school attendance

Discipline Understanding

Personal finance for 4th graders
The law for middle schoolers
Geography via the Olympics
Cultivating alegebraic thinking before 8th grade
Using art to teach middle schoolers about the Holocaust
Recess and reading scores


Learning habits
Why failure is important for learning
Sleep impacts performance
Meeting all students needs
Engaged parents help students learn

Great NYT interview about leadership

This NY Times interview with Charlotte Beers is really phenomenal. She touches on so many topics in leadership that I find relevant to my work - learning to self-correct and not interrupt others (one of the action items in my PD goal of improving my communication), finding out how others see you (my upcoming Division Head assessment), assessing the "whole person" (my supervision of faculty), the importance of being able to lead "from the front" using the strength of your values and beliefs (my recent work with the community about a parent suicide), the challenge of trying to change a culture (my NAIS Fellowship project), and what to look for when hiring (a process I just went through).

Scenes from Step-Up Day

Today was our annual Step-Up Day, when students at each level "step up" to the next level for the morning to experience what life will be like in the next grade: ECC to K, 1st to 2nd, 3rd to 4th, 5th to 6th, and 6th to 7th (the 8th grade spent the morning working on their graduation projects). This event helps children engage in the transition to a new role, whether moving to a new classroom or, for current K, 2nd, and 4th graders, experiencing what it will be like to be the elders in a  classroom with a younger cohort joining them. Here are some photos from the event.

Blackberry (K/1): During an open work period, children were at the listening station, painting with watercolors, doing needlepoint, and in the block area.

 

 

Laurel Creek (K/1): During an open work period, children were playing games, in the block area, in the dress-up, doing logic games on the computer, making flags, and working at the creation station.

 

Sweet Briar (2/3): During math period, children played the game "Skunk"

 

 

 


Temescal (2/3): During an open work period, children were using the Montessori maps, the Montessori bells, using geometric cubes to do multiplication, and drawing three dimensional shapes on 3D graph paper.

 

 


Cerrito and Strawberry (4/5): During a math workshop, children were in pairs and table groups playing games including Close to 100, Boxed In, Top Sums, Concentration, and Find That Number.