Welcome back to school after the winter holidays! With the start of a new calendar year, January inspires a sense of both affirmation and possibility. As a midpoint to the school year, it’s a natural time to revisit goals and set new ones.
At Summers-Knoll, our mission is to “prepare children for the future through a challenging academic program that considers the whole child in a supportive, encouraging, and joyful environment.” We fulfill this mission through getting to know each child as an individual, cultivating a school-wide culture of care and belonging, engaging in rigorous project-based learning, and developing each child’s appreciation of—and skills in—art, music, Latin, and French.
We recognize that, for learning to be meaningful, students must see and make connections between the work they are doing in school and the “real” world.
For example, in the Preschool’s project Ready! Set! Go!, preschool students have been learning physics – yes, physics! They’ve been exploring the concepts of force and motion through building, experimenting, and moving through everyday endeavors such as putting on their winter gear before going outside!
In the Young 5/Kindergarteners’ storytelling project, students are learning how to retell stories. They learn through inquiry and exploration. They invite a published author in as a guest speaker and then go out into the community to see to a live theatre performance. They develop their skills as writers and storytellers through project-based learning.
In the 1st/2nd grade classroom, students have been taking a deep dive into human’s exploration of space with their project Earth in Space. To build their knowledge about space exploration, they’ve gone to a planetarium, hosted a virtual guest speaker scientist from NASA who is working on Mars exploration, and researched various spacecraft. Thinking like engineers, they are currently designing their own spacecraft inventions based upon the facts they’ve learned. If the goal is to design and build your own spacecraft, there’s a lot you need to learn while pursuing your mission!
In the third/fourth grade classroom, in their Out of Eden Neighborhood Mapping project, students launched the year with the driving question: How can we better understand and accept others’ perspectives? They mapped their own neighborhoods and got to know their local communities better. They corresponded online with students from other countries and learned about their lives and neighborhoods. They also applied their critical thinking skills to identify who, in their local community, they might not often get a chance to know (e.g., whose voices are not often heard) and asked themselves how to get to know those people better. They identified wanting to know more about the senior citizens in their community, so just this past week, the students visited with folks at Silver Maples Retirement Community and interviewed them about their lives. They will return to Silver Maples in a couple of weeks after writing Tanka poems based upon their interview data, and they’ll share their poems with their new grandfriends.
Meaningful projects take on a life of their own, and often continue well beyond their end date, overlapping with the next project—students get invested, and they’re eager to follow through with their commitments, especially when they experience the reciprocal benefits of connecting with community members who have become friends.
In their first project of the year, the Upper School students studied the concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage. They looked at cultures around the world, and then they turned their lens inward. They researched the history of Summers-Knoll and drew upon their own lived histories at SK to write and illustrate a Things SK book, which describes aspects of SK’s intangible cultural heritage. These books are now available for the SK community to peruse. Come check one out from our library!
With recognition of so much great work in which the students have been engaged, we move into 2025 with confidence and aspirations. We’ve learned a lot, and there’s always more to learn—onward ho!
Photograph above: Sunrise on The Flatirons in Boulder, CO (December, 2024)