The GreenMount Kindergarten

Preparations are almost complete for welcoming our first kindergarten class to The GreenMount School. As of today we will begin with 12 new students and we understand that they are all excited about the beginning of their school career. The parents are excited too and have started play groups over the summer to get the children acquainted and ready to work cooperatively. Our newest students will be partnered with our 8th graders this year as "buddies" when we have our Community Day activities every Friday. We also have some plans for these buddies to get together throughout the course of the week to share books and stories.

Look for more information about what we are doing at GMS in a posting later this month. If you are not familiar with our unique, constructivist approach to learning and would like to know more, contact me at 410-235-6295. We have openings in every grade except 7 and 8 and are looking for some unique students to fill them.

Steve Warner
Head of School

The Middle East theme event is fast approaching

March 4, 2008

While the peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis have stalled as reported in yesterday’s news, they are alive and well at The GreenMount School in Baltimore. Or at least they will be as part of a theme culmination that has included an in-depth study of The Middle East in grades 1-8. The culmination event will take place on March 14 between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. and will include our eighth graders trying to solve some of the persistent political and cultural problems about which they have become surprisingly knowledgeable. Other students will be slipping prayers into our 8’x16’ replica of The Wailing Wall, entertaining our guests with Middle Eastern tea selections in our Tea Room or demonstrating the art of creating Egyptian cosmetics in the Bazaar. Our visitors will also be invited to visit our mosque fashioned after the one in Washington, D.C. which we visited recently. Learning about the countries of The Middle East will be demonstrated by students as they reside in their country on a scale map drawn on the gym floor. Also in the gym, visitors can visit the pyramids, the Sphinx and see a demonstration of how simple machines contributed to their construction. Other displays and activities include Egyptian jewelry making, Hebrew calligraphy and a replica of a Middle Eastern Christian church. Our youngest students will entertain all of us with traditional songs throughout the program.
Our students are the future ambassadors of good will in the Middle East and the knowledge they have gained may very well launch a career, a diplomat or even a world leader who will understand and appreciate Ancient Cultures in Modern Times.

Reading Strategies

I would like to share with you some of the things that we are doing to grow professionally as a staff. At this week’s staff meeting we introduced the book, Strategies That Work by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis. This book is recognized as the definitive work on teaching comprehension monitoring strategies. For years teachers and parents alike have assumed to some degree or another that once students could read effectively (at about the fourth grade level), that they also could comprehend everything they were able to read. Not so. We have many wonderful decoders out there and students who have exceptional word recognition, but who do not understand what they have read. The fact is, comprehension needs to be taught at every level. Have you ever read some text as an adult that you found hard to understand? What did you do to make sense of what you read? What strategies did you employ? The staff at GMS will be reading Strategies That Work in order to learn more about how to help students at all levels become more strategic readers. We began our investigation on Friday. We are also going to be looking carefully at what we consider to be our approach to writing. We will be employing the 6+1 Trait Writing Approach which is a logical progression of seven sets of skills necessary to be an effective writer. These two initiatives will be the focus of our professional development for the rest of the year. Next year we will have in place a reasonable school-wide writing program that identifies standards for writing at each grade level. The 6+1 Writing Traits Approach will be employed with the objective of having all students reach a grade level standard that we have identified as a result of this year’s investigation.


If you Google 6+1 Writing Traits you may find The Northern Nevada Writing Project and the McRel site from which we will download much of the material that we will use to implement this program. Or go to www.nwrel.org and www.writingfix.com for more information.


Our second theme, Ancient Cultures – Modern Times is moving along quite well. In theme studies students are working on projects as they investigate the countries of the Middle East and Liz Bolton has begun her Hebrew classes that students will attend once a week. We will be planning a field trip to a mosque and an embassy in the near future and if you have any ideas for how that might look, I would welcome your input. And as always, we hope that our wonderfully diverse community can be tapped to add to our understanding during this theme. Please let me know how you would like to contribute to our investigations

Homework

Recently we have been hearing of some students who are having difficulty completing their homework in a timely fashion. Students and parents alike are reporting time spent on homework that is well beyond what we expect. At our staff development meeting on Friday we discussed this issue at length and have made some decisions that we hope will help to alleviate the problem. The faculty is committed to homework as a reinforcement of learning and as a way to prepare students for the learning that will take place on subsequent days. They are also committed to reasonable time frames for the work that is to be done. In an effort to realize those timeframes, teachers often give assignments for multiple days with the idea that the students will divide the assignment into manageable chunks rather than waiting until the last day to complete the two or three day assignment. We also recognize that projects sometimes overlap and that students often find themselves with due dates that require them to expand the time spent on homework. Another important aspect that your faculty recognizes is that young children and adolescents in general lack executive functioning. Research shows that the part of the brain (the pre frontal cortex) that helps us organize time and activities efficiently is underdeveloped in most children. For example, many children when faced with a temporary setback in achieving a goal will quit the activity. They don’t have the executive function to decide on another route to completion other than the original plan. The bottom line is that we have to be their executive function. With all this in mind (so to speak), the teachers have decided to post a calendar in the lobby on which they will list all projects, long term assignments and major assessments so that you and your children can clearly see what is due and when. From there a plan can be made to help your child meet deadlines by “chunking” the work into reasonable time periods. This calendar will also help the teachers to know about projects, etc. that are due in other classes. We believe that this transparency of assignments will help you and your student organize the time more efficiently and thus not have to spend so much time on any given night to completing homework. With all that said, if there is still a problem, please contact your child’s teacher. The faculty wants homework to be a productive part of the learning process, not a meaningless drudgery. There are also some good web sites out there such as http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr255.shtml that can give all of us some helpful hints about how to structure homework time.

About Our School

The report of The New Commission On The Skills Of The American Workforce, titled, Tough Choices or Tough Times articulates the challenges we face as educators in erasing the “education deficit” in our country. The report specifically addresses the fact that American workers today can no longer compete with the highly skilled workers of countries like China and India who are willing to put their talent to work for low wages. The conclusion that the report draws is that our system must learn to produce graduates who are innovative, creative and critical thinkers who “invent” the technologies, ideas and products that can be produced as outsourced goods.

At The GreenMount School, we are laying the groundwork for the very type of individual that is called for by the commission. Our students are encouraged to investigate topics, skills and strategies deeply to create what the Harvard Review calls “deep smarts”. The students here are allowed to use a constructivist approach to learning and are often independent in their approach to it. Our graduates are confident, contributing and capable of looking at new situations in which to apply prior learning effectively. The curriculum is theme-based with an emphasis on student products that demonstrate the intended learning.

An important part of our program is the preparation the students receive for their experiences as middle school students during which time they have the opportunity to travel abroad and be involved in the community in service learning projects. The travel this year in February will involve our eighth grade students in a week-long trip to Barcelona, Spain. During the trip the students will be hosted by their counterparts at a middle school there, but for the most part, the students will be responsible for planning the trip. They will decide on the itinerary, make arrangements for in-country travel, and make decisions about what they want to learn while they are in Spain. We believe that it is important for students to have a sense of other cultures and gain confidence as world travelers. In the spring of this year, students from Barcelona will travel to Baltimore to learn more about our culture and our approach to education. Our students will plan activities for their guests based on what they think are essential learning experiences for their new friends. In preparation for the trip and for receiving our guests, students are trying to raise money to offset the expenses of travel to Europe and the expenses of entertaining the students from Barcelona when they arrive in April.

Service learning projects are an important part of our middle school students’ experiences here at GreenMount. Our main goal is to expose our students to entrepreneurship so that they can exercise choices in their subsequent education. For example, a student who last year had a great experience at a local bakery has been featured on the Food Network because he wants to attend a special program in high school that will give him the skills and knowledge to apply chemistry, physics and even biology to become a chef. Our students learn from the real world and are given opportunities to explore many possibilities for their futures as members of the American society.

GreenMount School Newsletter 11.26.07

Greetings GreenMount Community,

I’d like to begin today by expressing my deepest thanks to the grandparents and special friends who attended our event on Wednesday. It was great fun and I know the children were all excited to share their learning with so many people who are special in their lives. I thoroughly enjoyed speaking to many of our distinguished guests who came from as far away as The United Kingdom to be with us. I also had a great time quizzing one grandparent on the order of her 20! Grandchildren. She did very well. We would also like to express our thanks for the contributions and pledges to our Annual Fund. The Grandparents and special friends have set the standard and given our campaign a wonderful beginning. We ended our visit with a beautiful performance from our chorus led by Ms. Laurie with exceptional accompaniment by Ms. Janet. Al in all, it was a great beginning to what we hope was a relaxing and fulfilling Thanksgiving holiday.
There are just a couple of announcements to make this week:

I will be conducting CTBS make-up tests for 8th grade students on Saturday. Those students involved know their testing times and whether they will be tested in math, reading or both.
There will be no weekly report this week because of the short week last week.

I would like to recommend a book for parents to read. It’s actually a report and something to which I have referred in the past. The title is Tough Choices or Tough Times and it is the report of The New Commission On The Skills Of The American Workforce. It comes from the National Center On Education And The Economy in Washington, D.C. I think it would be important for some parents to read this report to stimulate a discussion on how our school is or isn’t meeting the challenges put forth in its pages. I believe that GMS is at the forefront of producing students who can meet the challenges in the world economy that are described in the publication, but it would be productive to have some of you read this so that we could have a discussion – a book club-type discussion. Let me know if you are interested. I think the exchange of ideas may help us finalize the vision we should have for The GreenMount School.

We are now blogging! Please check out The Greenmount School blog by clicking on the icon on our home page. I’ll be posting the weekly messages as well as other facts about GMS that the world might be interested in understanding. We have a school that is a model for the way schools should be. It is our hope that we will hear from people around the world who discover our site and communicate with us to find out how parents and teachers create the kind of quality individuals who exit our doors. More later.

John F. Kennedy said, “There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.” People need to visit The GreenMount School to see how we are winning.

Cheers,

Steve

GreenMount Newsletter

Greetings GreenMount Community,

In the last installment of our weekly newsletter I was hoping to include some information about the accomplishments of some of our students outside of school. However, upon reflection it occurred to me that since we will begin to post our newsletter as part of our new blog, we shouldn’t include the names of students for the world to see. Still, I would like to celebrate contests won, goals scored, artwork exhibited, etc. for the benefit of our school community. I’ve decided that we will publish a separate bulletin to be distributed on paper only that will highlight the wonderful things that our students do when they go on to their after-school activities. We’ll send this along to you on a monthly basis to start and, depending on the volume of entries, consider sending it more often. The work that our students do here is worthy of nearly constant celebration. It only stands to reason that many of them continue to be successful in other aspects of their lives. Send your information directly to me.

As we look forward to Grandparents and Special Friends’ Day I hope you will pass along some things we will be asking our guests during the morning meeting. We’ll want to know who has come the greatest distance to attend our special event. We may also ask our grandparents who has the most grandchildren. We may also ask who has the most unusual nickname. My grandmother’s nickname was “Muz”. Can you top that? I’ve been racking my brain to come up with some other categories and I hope that by Wednesday to have a couple more. Any ideas? If you have a suggestion just send it along to www.mrsteveneedscreativeideasforgivingawaydoorprizes.org . If that address doesn’t work for you just use my regular email address at swarner@greenmountschool.org .

In the October 1 issue of this newsletter I referred to the work of Michael Gurian and his research on how boys learn. We talked a little bit about how boys do not hear, as a group, as well as girls. In fact, boys’ sensory input is generally less significant than that of girls. However, there are many things that boys react to very well that involve the senses. According to Gurian, in his book, The Minds of Boys, boys are great at gathering data from movement, active visual images, and some very specific auditory input. Among his findings is the fact that boys respond positively to music ( and so do girls). This is especially true for boys who may be struggling with math (Gurian p.165). “Many parts of the brain that build math skills are the same as those that react to music. Music can ‘wake up’ the brain for math learning and keep it awake.” Gurian goes on to say that music often correlates directly with math success. “The craft of music is built on a mathematical framework of scales, chords with prescribed intervals, timing rhythm, cadence, and beat. If your son learns an instrument and practices it daily, this simple exercise can improve math performance”. So, get your sons involved with music. Let them play it when doing homework (do we dare?) and encourage an appreciation for all kinds of music – even classical!

Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. For my part, I will celebrate the fact that I have been given the incredible opportunity to work for you as the head at GreenMount School. As I learn more about the values and talents that the good people in this community display, I continue to be impressed with who we are and who we can become in the future. I am grateful to the teachers here for their commitment to a rigorous learning environment that allows students to take ownership of their learning. I am grateful to parents who are responsible to their school and to every child, not only their own. I am most grateful to the students here who have given me a renewed faith in the potential of young people to take over a world that needs leaders.

If you are driving to your destination, be late – be safe. If you are flying, be patient. Good Luck!
Cheers,

Steve