Welcome!

Welcome to the blog of Zaq Roberts, Associate Head of School at The Berkeley School in Berkeley, CA. I blog about a wide variety of topics, from classroom moments I witness, to administrative events and conversations, to the educational blogs, videos, and books I am reading and watching, and how they are influencing my thinking. I hope this eclectic approach will give you insight into the many ways that I am engaging in advancing the school and strengthening our program, and I welcome your thoughts and comments!

This blog takes its name from a quotation by Archimedes that reads "Give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world." The TBS mission speaks directly to the need to engage a changing world, while many of the experiences in our program focus on the development of students' agency and authority. TBS is the lever by which we all - administration, faculty, students, and parents - can together move the world to be more humane, compassionate, and responsive. To borrow an important Montessori phrase, it is our way to remake the world.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Story plays and kelp forests!

Today brought a pair of year-end Celebrations of Learning in the Elementary Division. Tomorrow will be the 1/2 classrooms' year-end presentations; Monday brought Temescal Creek's (3rd grade) publishing party, which I unfortunately saw only briefly and in passing.

In Cerrito and Strawberry (4th/5th grades), the classrooms held a combined showcase of their work and learning during the current Oceans Unit. One portion of Strawberry Creek was transformed into a kelp forest, while Cerrito Creek centered around a tidepool. Both classrooms featured student-written animal reports, with additional activities including a "seagull dissection" emphasizing the impact of the pacific trash patch, live krill for inspection, paper plate models depicting the relative amount of water, land, etc covering the earth's surface, and ocean-related poetry.























In Sweet Briar Creek (Kindergarten), students finished their literature unit on Fairy Tales by putting on a Story Play titled "Good vs. Evil", which they had collectively written. At the conclusion of the play, they answered questions from audience members that ranged from "How did you resolve disagreements about what ideas to include?" and "What parts of this play remind you of other fairy tales?" to "What flavor cake did they eat at the end?"






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