Sun and Stories and Song
Sun and Stories and Song
We have now successfully completed our first full week of school! Our days have been full of sunshine, stories, and song as the children skip from class to class. Here are the blocks that each class is engaged in:
Morning Glory Class: The Story of Tembo the Eager Elephant, stringing garlands, and wet felting
Rosemary Class: The Little Round Bun and making Michaelmas swords
Grade 1: Form Drawing with Native stories and Fairytales
Grade 2: Language Arts with African Folktales
Grade 3: Language Arts with Hebrew Stories
Grade 4: Language Arts with Norse Mythology
Grades 5 and 6: Geometry
Grade 7: African Geography
Grade 8: Algebra and Cyber Civics
Important Dates
Monday, September 7: Labor Day (holiday) - no school
Monday, September 21: Yom Kippur (holiday) - no school
Tuesday and Wednesday, September 22 and 23: Picture Days
Monday, September 28: Back to School Night and Kim John Payne Event 5 to 7 p.m.
Back to School Night on Monday, September 28
We look forward to seeing you at our Back to School Night. We will gather at 5 p.m. for refreshments, then have an opportunity to meet all faculty, staff, committee leads, and board members. At 5:30 p.m. we will have a zoom presentation by author and consultant, Kim John Payne. Our school is in the second year of a three-year faculty training with Kim who is helping us build our integrative student support program. This presentation is a wonderful chance to learn more about his approach and how we are supporting the students in our care. We request that every family is represented at this meeting!
Below is a podcast from Kim John Payne's Simplicity Parenting Podcasts. In this episode, he introduces “tone and timing coaching," a simple way to help children (and ourselves) get the tone right when what's said comes out rude, fresh, aggressive, or grumpy. He explains that the content of a child's message is often perfectly fine; it's the delivery that isn't helpful. Since these moments arise multiple times every day, they offer countless opportunities to help children learn attunement: sensing the right time to speak and the right way to say something. Kim frames this as tuning an instrument, and notes that a sense of timing and tone will serve children well in friendships, at school, and crucially in their future adult lives.