I’ve been thinking a lot about trust recently. It’s a quality that suffuses our school, and it makes a difference in so many ways, both big and small. At Chicago Friends School, students move independently around the school. Yesterday, I was watching over the indoor recess, and when my group changed from the gym to…
Right now, each student in our small 4th-grade class is making a map of a different continent. We’ve been making maps since the second week of school, starting small (mapping our classroom) and expanding our focus month by month. We’ve learned about maps, and now maps are our first step toward understanding continents and cultures…
At Chicago Friends School, we have very small class sizes. When people talk about small classes, the ability to customize instruction and provide individual students with teacher attention come up a lot. Those are important—part of the reason I wanted to teach here was that I wanted to be in a place where I would…
Chicago Friends School has a strong commitment to service, and it’s one of the things I love about the school. Our most recent service trip was to plant grasses at a new playground in Lincoln Park with the Lincoln Park Conservancy. Service beyond the school walls is great for the kids. To begin with, it…
Our second Day of Service for this school year was centered on trees and we observed it on Arbor Day, of course! We began the day with Meeting for Community. Afterwards, students in grades K-3 walked over to Senn High School, where some of our students presented poems about trees and the high school students…
Math class is the first academic subject of the day, and in my class, we always try to start with a brain teaser of some kind. Some weeks, it’s a form of equation construction that the kids can each approach on their own level, such as ___ x ____ = 15. The two missing terms…