One of the most compelling pedagogical concepts I’ve ever come across is very simple: Don’t teach a vocabulary word until students already know the concept it describes. Let the experience you create be not, “Okay, there’s this word, and apparently it means X,” but, “Oh! That’s the word for that!” During the fall term, In science class,…
This past week, our school had to make a brief and abrupt shift to online learning for two days, and came back to in-person school on Thursday. All of my class already had some experience of remote learning, from last spring. But we did not know this class as an online community, and we found…
With the current school year coming to an end, I know that parents are feeling excited and anxious about sending their soon to be kindergarteners off to school in the fall. Are they ready? Do they have the right skills? While many of us focus on the basics of letter and number recognition or reading…
To culminate our unit on narrative writing we wrote “small moment stories” which were detailed true stories from our own lives. To cap this off, my class had a writing celebration and invited family and friends to join us for a reading. The process leading up to the celebration – choosing a story, revising,…
Friday was Grandparents and Special Friends Day here at Chicago Friends School. During Community Meeting, which culminated our morning together, Karen asked the query, “How does our community feel different on this day?” There were a lot of interesting and insightful comments. I kept my comment inside but thought I would share it here. Our…
We undertook one of my favorite school traditions this week. Students and teachers made the forty-minute walk to our sister organization – the Quaker senior community at the Admiral at the Lake. We have come to recognize many of the landmarks on this walk. We pass the Thorndale L station, a hub for our community…