Fourth Grade Play

May 30th 2025

May 29, 2025

Dear LREI Families,

I hope that you are well on one of our last days of school. I know that I am one of the few members of the community who is not checking off the remaining days on a calendar, but I know that it is coming and coming fast. This time of the year is filled with culminating projects and presentations and, of course, tests, quizzes, and papers. All of these end of unit, end of course, end of year exercises are important, and they each require and showcase different skills and modes of achievement.

Yesterday afternoon, I was eager to attend the Fourth Grade play,

Immigration Nation: Once Upon a Golden Door. I was not disappointed. Rather, I was thrilled by what I saw. So great to see parents laughing, and crying, due to the work that their children produced. So wonderful to hear from younger students that they were excited to see their fourth grade schoolmates on the big stage. The fourth graders were clearly proud and happy and enjoying themselves. How amazing is all of that? If we wanted to, we could stop here and call this event a success. However, that would be a shame, as so much more transpired than a well-done 4th grade performance.

Here are a few other ways in which this performance showcased fourth grade growth and achievement:

The story, written by the students, required the actors and the audience to go back and forth in time. This is a challenge for all and must have pushed the fourth graders as they wrote and acted. They are only a few years into really understanding the concept of “the past,” and here they were playing with it and bending it to their will.

The show was really funny. The students’ ability to appropriately combine the serious themes at the heart of this tale of American immigration with their very fourth grade sense of humor was amazing. And it was really funny.

Somehow, they came up with the idea of using a game show to introduce the audience to three immigrant activists and their stories. Funny? Yes! Moving? Yes! Informative? Yes! A clever device? You bet, and sophisticated and smart and a little middle-schooly.

The students ran the show. Once the lights went down, they took over. This is true with our middle school and high school productions, as well. We knew they were ready for this. Did they? They know it now. The cognitive-juggling involved is a sure sign of hard work and growth. This is the sort of achievement that is rarely recognized in schools.

When things went wrong, the kids figured out what to do. They knew this show cold. There’s a problem? Just fix it!

The integration of social studies, reading, writing, music, art, and tech had the impact that we know this sort of work has. So many ways for students to demonstrate all that they learned, opportunities for all students to share their strengths and to have their “growing edges” challenged. They were asked to put their full selves on display and to show all of the ways they have grown and need to grow. Talk about a final exam!

And then there was achievement that is both everywhere and harder to see. I wish I could ask the students how they feel now (I am writing this late in the evening after the show. I guess I can ask them tomorrow). Can they feel what they mastered? Can they imagine how much easier it is going to be next year, in fifth grade, when they are asked to read aloud or to share an answer with the class? Do they know how this play is setting them up to be the person in high school, maybe in college, who will use art to answer a question in science or science in an art project? Can they feel the intellectual growth? Maybe their hat size is larger today just due to the brain development they have experienced. This is true learning – skill building, content acquisition, collaboration, connections to yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and demonstrating achievement by communicating what you know to someone else. Truly authentic rigor.

A last thought about the fourth grade show. Our guides throughout this hour-long bravura performance was a flock of pigeons, about as New Yorky story telling device as you can get and really funny. But oh so much more. The pigeons, immigrants themselves, looked down on the action over time, observing all, teaching, mocking, admiring. They were the not-so-silent observers, both “of” and “outside of” the action. Above it all, commenting on the foibles and trials of man. So sophisticated, so smart.

I saw the first grade version of this display of academic growth at the first grade museum and cafe. Again, integration of disciplines and skills and content in a way that invites us all into the experience and that also provides a way for students to demonstrate the knowledge and understanding of the world that they brought with them on the first day of school. We saw it earlier in the year with the fours; it was their butterflies in my email last Friday, as well as the kindergarten and the third grade. Second grade is still to come. I know I will see authentic rigor and agency and growth during the middle school grade level shares next week. The anticipation is exciting.

We saw this same level of authentic rigor last week as the eleventh graders taught us all about their research fieldwork to seven sites around the country. We will see it next week when the seniors share the work they did on their senior projects. These projects will take as many forms as there are seniors and will involve deep study, creative work, service to the community, reading, writing, and communication. Behind the scenes, the students have been practicing a number of skills they have to master as they head off to college and university – most notably for me, how to productively fill the time on an empty day. That is the challenge of a first year college student from day one, and our soon to be graduates are well-practiced already.

Thank you to the talented teachers who set the stage to create these opportunities and who built these platforms for growth in deeply important intellectual skills into each LREI classroom each day. The depth of understanding of their students, of where they are developmentally and what they need to move on to the next stage in their development and schooling, is truly remarkable. Such talent!! Again, in our end-of-year events and, of course, in our daily classroom work, we see this understanding and this level of skill throughout the school’s 14 years. Thank you, LREI teachers, you are the best.

The three R’s and so very much more.