Fourth Grade Tinkers!

If you find yourself on the second floor of the lower school midday each Friday you are apt to hear the rustling of tools and the tapping of hammers in the fourth grade classrooms. In two, six week sessions, Lower School Assistant Teacher, Zach Posnan will be working with 4th graders in the newly formed Tinkering Club where students have the opportunity to take apart devices and appliances large and small, to see how they work.  Getting tools in the hands of children is a powerful way of teaching them how things work and builds confidence at the same time.  Girls and boys make up equal membership ing the club. According to Posnan, so many students wanted to participate, that he needed to run two sections of the club suggesting that interest in mechanical thinking, engineering, and experimentation in the age of hand held devices and screens is alive and well.

Got Code: Middle School Begins Coding Club

Ken Rogers, Head of the Middle School recently announced the addition of a new Coding Club in the Middle School following a self paced curriculum online through Codeacademy.  As club sponsor, Rogers will guide students on independent projects from webpages to gaming.  You can hear more about Codeacademy by its founder, Mitch Resnick, by clicking here to connect to his Ted Talk, titled Let's Teach Kids to Code".

Challenge GA: Design Thinking in Action

Upper school students have been busy these last weeks thinking about what makes a house a home. In particular, how to translate that feeling to McNeil Hall, their home away from home. Challenge GA, a year long design thinking competition got underway in late September and for the next seven month, students will wrestle with new of creative problem solving. Using a technique developed at Stanford Design School, by David Kelley, called Design Thinking, students will solve for the question by employing a process where they will:  Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.  Beginning with interviews of their peers, the first phase of the year long project is to understand and define what people need for a building space to feels like home. Working in advisories with solutions evaluated  by way of a house competition, the winning idea will be implemented in 2014-15.

Sir Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paragdigms

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

Technomancer: Student Tech Support in the Middle School

"Technomancer" is a term a number of my students adopted during their 6th grade year that combines technology and necromancer (magician, sorcerer) and reflects their comfort with and ability to manipulate technology and apply it in new, transformative ways in education." reports David Baroody, teacher in the middle school. 

It is a fitting term for the new student technology group that was assembled just prior to the Back To School Night in late September.  The group's first task? Helping during the evening event to get the parents wired and connected to two new information initiatives - The Middle Matters, a blog written by MS head, Ken Rogers and The Middle School Lobby the go to place on our virtual learning environment where parents can access everything from divisional news and calendars, to athletics and grade level pages.   And their next tasks? Helping the rest of us to get wired and connected.  Baroody is especially excited about this team because it  offers students comfortable with technology a way to share their expertise and practice leadership roles in technology while benefiting the whole MS community.

What We Are Reading

"From the bestselling author of How We Decide comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity Imagine. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,” Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single “gift” possessed by the lucky few. It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively. Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, and daydreaming productively, then he takes us out of our own heads to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing habits and the drug addiction of poets. We’ll meet a bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented an entirely new surfing move. We’ll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar designed its office space to get the most out of its talent. Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, Imagine reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world." from, www.jonahlehrer.com.