LREI: Lower School

Click on one of the dates below to read any of the messages
from the 2004-2005 school year:

Dear Lower School Families,
So much writing is woven into Lower School life. I thought you would enjoy an update. In the spring, some classes took off in a new direction. First Graders wrote sequential instructional pieces called “How To” Books, Second Graders shared their areas of personal expertise in what they called “All About” Books, while Third Graders worked on creating persuasive paragraphs. Here are some examples from their efforts:

First, put hula dancing clothes on and put music on.
Then, put both arms left and go back and forth.
Third, sway your hips.
Fourth, pretend you’re throwing flowers at the ground and sky and side to side.
Fifth, do it again.
Sixth, stop when you want to.

First, you kick the ball when it comes to you.
Run to second base when the next person comes. If they run straight to second base, you run to third.
When the next person runs to first base, then you run home.
Do it all again.

The violin is like a viola! Well, if you know how to play the viola, you know how to play the violin. The viola has a lower sound than the violin. Sometimes you can get mixed up by the cello and the violin…Violas are bigger than violins, but violas are smaller than cellos."

What’s different?: Italian foods are cooked and sold in Little Italy. There are many Italian shops. People speak Italian. It feels unique.
Where it is: How do I get there? If you live in Manhattan you may walk. You may also take a car but then you have to find a place to park. To find a parking spot: 1.) Drive around Chinatown. 2.) Drive around Little Italy. 3.) Find an empty spot. 4.) Put enough money in the meter for the time you want to stay. If you parked in Chinatown, walk over."

THIRD GRADE "PERSUASIVE PARAGRAPHS":
" My pen is in my hand. I feel very calm and then I let myself go. Drawing has been going on for many years. The first drawings were beautiful cave paintings. There are many materials, from pens to pencils, used for drawing. I think billions of people should draw because it is a very fun and open subject. There is no specific way to draw. Some people draw abstract and some draw figurative. To be an artist is to be free."

" Reading is a quiet and calm activity everyone should do. Learning to read will help with everyday life, like reading signs. It’s cool that blind people want to read so badly they invented a way, Braille. If you slump back from running, you can read and calm down. You can read by yourself or someone can read to you. Reading can help your brain. Reading is fun and emotional. Reading is a very helpful subject."

"… Why don’t you try skateboarding? Skateboarding feels like a roller coaster that you are about to zoom down! Also, skateboarding is a good way to get around…."

" Do you have a favorite guitarist? Everyone should play. It is hard at first, but once you get a good teacher, you’re great. You could be playing notes, chords and songs. Music feeds the soul!…."

With great enthusiasm, children tapped into their firsthand experiences to create powerful writing.

Dear Lower School Families,

All Midyear Reports have been mailed out and as this chapter comes to a close, we quickly look ahead to the next. I thought you might like to know what follows:

Early spring is the time when we ask faculty to make a commitment to LREI for the following year or to inform us if their plans are changing. February and March are also a time of job fairs and the unofficial start of the hiring process. It is a process that our division takes seriously. It begins with my sifting through an extraordinarily large number of resumes and choosing a few candidates to interview. Those who stand out make return visits. Our teachers have opportunities to observe them in demo lessons and get to know them during interviews. Phil participates in this phase as well, meeting with Elaine to make the final decision on all hiring. Then we all meet to discuss such aspects as: the candidates’ understanding of progressive education, their interpersonal skills and confidence, management strategies, grasp of content, and, of course, their references. Eventually, we agree to offer a position to the most qualified among the group. Then we welcome these new teachers by connecting them to a faculty mentor and inviting them to spend a few days with us in the spring.

At the same time, and in much the same way, Delia and faculty are hard at work hiring, or re-hiring, associate teachers. Additionally, they consider carefully the match between associate and head, as well as the candidate’s experience and fit with our school.

“ Fit” is a word that merits description. As we meet teacher candidates, we look for experience, considering both teachers’ past job descriptions and their choices of schools. We review where they spent their graduate years, if locally, we look to Bank Street College, NYU and Teachers College. We speak at length with the candidate, listening first for how they talk about children, then how they view their own growth and what they look for in collegial relations. We describe LREI and ask, “Are you comfortable with diversity in curriculum and student body? Do you like to work hard? How do you address a range of learners? What do you enjoy in your work with parents? What do you expect your goals will be during your first year here?”

As always, thinking about September in February and March is counter-intuitive at the very least. It feels that just as we are coalescing and working strongly together as a team, we need to think ahead to change. Not easy for any of us! While most teachers will return in the fall, some will inevitably have new plans – and will be missed.

Schools present us with a cycle unlike that in any other field. We renew and grow each year as new faculty join us. We also work extremely hard to maintain our high ethical and academic standards, the heart and soul of our progressive philosophy.
So this is the start of that phase, and often it is with us through June. Faculty hiring is a labor- intensive process with few shortcuts. Whatever the timetable, please be assured that I will keep you in the loop as decisions are finalized.

In one way or another, the start of a new year always gives us pause. We reflect on our families, our school community, and on a world that currently heaves with alarming events. As these worlds draw together, I think about the environment at LREI. It should be snug and safe, welcoming and supportive, nurturing and kind. As we here review schedules, program and professional expectations and give thought to individual students, we consistently look for ways to better ourselves, offering students appropriately rich and varied opportunities so they may grow as thinkers, doers and citizens. In this mode, I'd like to share with you my goals and wishes for our students in 2005:

May our students view themselves as powerful thinkers who embrace complexity and welcome challenge. As they experience the processes of original thought and problem solving, gain new understanding and the feeling of accomplishment, they become authentic lifelong learners.

May they see themselves as doers, young people who can affect change both in their interactions and collaboration with classmates and teachers and in themselves. Our students are aware that their respect for others resonates and ripples throughout their class. They respond actively to new information and new experience. Courageously, they choose the high road, confident that they will find support.

May they know themselves as citizens, working to erase the lines between “us and them” and working toward “de-othering,” as one of our parents phrased it. Whether they begin with social justice or service learning, our students accept their roles as actively caring members of a community without borders.

As report time draws near (early February), I encourage you to keep these three goals of LREI education in mind and remember that they are achievable because of the personal attention and commitment of our talented teachers. Please join me in continuing to support our extraordinary faculty.

Providing a rich program that doesn't sacrifice depth for range.
Offering individual challenge alongside individual support.
Matching student expectation and accountability with grade level standards.
Incorporating children's voices within a set curriculum plan.
Creating a well-paced day and week.
Championing the new, while safeguarding all that we stand for.
Vigorously and fairly supporting children, teachers and you!

I had that “fly on the wall” opportunity yesterday, sitting in our Second Grade classrooms as teachers began to build the foundation for their study of ethnic neighborhoods in NYC. Their first step was to create a context through mapping, and so, the question, “What is a map?” was tossed to the students without preamble. Here are their responses:

A map helps you find where you want to go.
A map is a thing that can help you figure out which stop you want to go to on a subway.
A map can help you discover stuff that you’ve never known before.
If you are lost, it helps you find your way. It’s a book that can help you when you’re lost.
Maps can be carried around.
A map has a map key to tell you where things are.
There are all different kinds of maps— ski maps, treasure maps, world maps, subway maps, bus maps, NYC maps, golf course maps, museum maps.
A map helps you find treasures.
A globe is a kind of map of the whole world.

Some of us have gay family members.
Gay adults are important members of the LREI community. They are teachers and our founder.
Today and in the past, gay adults have helped our world to grow and change in important ways.

During recent classroom visits, I’ve been following a thread of “descriptive language teaching” as it wends its way up through the grades. I was able to pick up the tip of a thread as the EK were making Play Dough. Their teacher, Diane, asked: How did the old play dough feel? “Hard.” “Crumbly.” The new Play Dough? “Squishy.” “Soft.” She asked children to observe the salt and flour and describe how they looked, then to put one of each in a hand to feel the difference. Youngsters used words like, “just like sugar” and “not as smooth” when they talked about salt. Flour was “creamy.”

In a First Grade room, students included descriptive language as they focused on the beginning, middle and end portions of their memoir writing. Second Graders were adding dialogue to their writing and discussing the positioning of question marks. Children suggested that “shouted” and “whispered” could be substituted for the verb “said.” Also under the microscope was the way that interesting language can create a powerful lead sentence in a story. Second Graders sampled leads from classroom books before composing their own.

Third Graders continued to explore exciting dialogue and the appropriate placement of quotation marks, while Fourth Graders drew the distinction between “blah” and “colorful” words. For the former, students listed: “nice, cool, fine, great, funny and stuff.” Among the colorful ones were: “colossal, luscious, plump, spectacular, exhausting, shimmering, ecstatic, exotic, devastating and oozed.”

The process, as you can see, is an ongoing one that begins with rich verbal descriptions before students are fluent writers and builds throughout their LREI writing experience.

Whatever our children’s ages, whatever our home rhythms, we know that children’s choices are influenced by the media, by advertising either blatant or masquerading as entertainment. Last week I attended a conference entitled ”Commercialized Childhood” led by author, Juliet Schor (Born to Buy).

Junk food is the number one product marketed to children.
Advertisers work to generate what they refer to as “pester power” or the “nag factor.”
After getting children to ask (and ask and ask) for a product, marketers work to break down parent resistance, aware that food is often the “battle to lose” among the many demands, including homework and bedtime.
Marketers also appeal to mothers’ nutritional good intentions with what they call the “wholesome halo,” placing junk items under the umbrella of foods we consider wholesome (such as yogurt) and advertising in respectable venues such as Scholastic, PBS and Children’s Television Workshop.

On the bright side, I learned of some steps we can take to counteract these unrelenting influences. Of course, these will vary according to our home styles and schedules. Can we:

Share family dinners more frequently? (frequent reference was made to “the demise of the family meal”)
Offer attractive healthy alternatives to junk food?
Reduce our children’s exposure to television ads?
Create in them a sense of critical awareness?

In this context, I want to extend a thank you to our food committee for reviewing our lunch, snack and afterschool offerings with an eye to the most nutritious solutions possible. Equally, to Cater-to-You for its incredibly healthy lunches, the daily fresh fruit, range of salad ingredients and soups made from scratch. Thanks, Claudia and Yael, Co-Chairs of the food committee. Thanks, Carlos!

With her class seated on the rug, a First Grade teacher asked: “How should partners decide who will share their writing plan first?” First Graders suggested: “We could vote, like for John Kerry.” “We could do ‘rock, paper, scissors.’” “The steadiest person could go first.” From these ideas the teacher chose “rock, paper, scissors.”

A child asked: “Are you going to tell us who our partners are?,” and the teacher replied: “Absolutely.”

I was impressed by how much learning went into the simple set-up of this activity, before any “content” was broached. In the first instance, the teacher gave the message that it would be both efficient and fair to settle on a system for deciding who shares first. Additionally, she thought that they might be better able to come up with good ideas as a whole group, and that everyone should hear and weigh each other’s. She also knew that it was wise to agree on a process before partners were grouped.

Then she helped students see that, of options available to them, some fit particular situations better than others. She acknowledged how much information children brought from non-school situations – such as current events and playground games – validating each suggestion.

Importantly, children also heard that not all choices would be theirs to make. In a soft, warm voice, a clear limit was set from the start, and First Graders could then relax into their work with no thought of negotiating a shift, lobbying to work with a buddy, or complaining about working with a boy/girl. Ready for the other main dish, students could focus on the task of sharing a writing plan and putting their ideas on paper.

We all appreciate the central position occupied by conceptual understanding and skill acquisition in Lower School learning. This example reminds us of the value of complementary dynamics such as organizational planning, collaborative problem solving, and a respect for the needs of a group.