SWIMS March Newsletter
March
1st & 8th…Parent/Teacher Conferences – No School. Parent/Teacher Conference Sign-up
5th...Happy Birthday Kassidy!
15th…Wearin’ o’ the Green during regular class time
16th…Happy Birthday Franzi!
20th…Early Childhood/Elementary/Middle School field trip to see The Best of Sleeping Beauty by BalletNEXT at Santy Auditorium
April
12th…SWIMS Earth Day Celebration – No School!
All families are invited to come enjoy our Earth Day Celebration, “The Child in Nature.” Each class offers nature-themed activities for children of all ages to explore. 3rd year early childhood students will be presenting their capstone Ancestry Reports, Wasatch Elementary and Evergreen Middle School students will be presenting their Science Fair projects. Bring your family to learn something new about the nature of our planet from your child.
Families A-M 9:30 – 10:30
Families N-Z 10:30 – 11:30
3rd year EC students, Wasatch and Evergreen students 9:00 – 11:30am
Breakfast Club students welcome as early as 7:45am
Join us to celebrate our planet and her people!
15th – 19th…No School – Spring Break!
School Bulletin Board
Thank you to all families for helping with the foods, crafts, stories and style of our Asian Celebration on February 28th! It was a wonderful melange of sensorial experiences of Asia.
Thank you in advance to Michele Wiles, former principal dancer with American Ballet Theater, for arranging a special performance of The Best of Sleeping Beauty to complement our ec Tchaikovsky curriculum. All ec, elementary and middle school students will attend this performance at the Santy Auditorium on March 20th at the Santy. Michele’s company, BalletNEXT has plans on the horizon to include Park City students in a rich arts curriculum. Stay tuned for details!
And a final thank you to all of you who have so far responded so generously to our Wings to Peru drive for learning materials for infants and toddlers.The drive will continue until April so please look through your gently used outgrown infant and toddler toys and bring by what these children will enjoy.
Our new classrooms are getting close to being ready for opening. However, we sadly made the decision to postpone opening until fall due unforeseen obstacles. However, this gives us time to make sure the final preparations are done well including a new state of the art playground designed just for infants!
Congratulations, Eden, Katie and Leith! Eden, Katie and Leith all recently completed their last rounds of testing for their Montessori credentials from Center for Guided Montessori Studies. Jillian and Paulina will soon begin their credentialing journeys. And there are a handful pondering the same Master’s in Montessori that Kassidy just completed. Plus one more ready to jump on the EdD boat! Teachers never rest – they just keep going back to class!
Death & Taxes…For your tax preparation pleasure, the SWIMS EIN# is 45-0949195 .
Lower School
Infant & Toddler Impressions – News from the El Nido Infant Class, Bumblebees, Chickadees, Sunflowers & Tadpoles Toddler Classes
Geography studies for infants and toddlers are about experiencing foods, music, art, animals and experiences from each of the continents as the rest of the school travels through the curriculum. We want our students to become familiar with the sensorial experiences of many cultures so when they go into the world it will all seem like an extension of their known world rather than something strange and possibly threatening. Our Asian Celebration was a wonderful mix of sensory input. In March we take a look at Europe – the native wildlife, people, homes and foods. You can be sure we will be tasting new things such as crepes and hummus. We will also study reptiles and visit with some of our school pets such as Cucumber the tortoise, Evan the corn snake, Sprinkles the leopard gecko, and Draco the bearded dragon. As always, our units of study will be complemented through our art, science projects, music, language, math and cooking projects.
We will be preparing for our Earth Day Celebration on April 12th by creating experiential activities for your family based on the land in nature. Wee suspect there will be experiments with sand, water, rocks and soil in the infant and toddler classes through March!
Excellence from Early Childhood – Every Day in the Bluebirds, Ladybugs & Turquoise Classes
The long winter work periods have brought students through the exploratory stage of ec classes and into the more complex lessons. 1st year students can now sort out the artifacts in the Geography drawers – which animals belong in North America, South America, Asia or Europe? Where does the harpy eagle belong? How about the stork? They can make a challenging choice, prepare their own work space, complete the activity to the best of their ability and put everything back where it came from. This is called completing the work cycle and is a foundational element for the executive function skills students are building.
2nd year ec students have mastered much of the Practical Life and Sensorial materials and are working on the phonetic sounds of the letters and associating quantities with written numbers. They are practicing proper penmanship and are starting to read and write some simple phonetic words. They are also working hard on social skills and can now solve a problem on their own, arriving at a solution that works for everyone.
3rd year ec students are polishing off the more challenging lessons in each area of the classroom. They are practicing academic skills daily and see themselves as leaders. They are often the ones to remind others when there is an infraction of the rules or when some detail has been overlooked. This 3rd year in early childhood is the frosting on the cake when the previous two years’ work is coming together to create a polished whole – a student who is advanced in academic skills, social skills and confidence, enabling them to go into our elementary class with a sense of responsibility, knowing how to both lead and follow and with a joy for learning.
Upper School
Updates from Upper School: News from the Wasatch Elementary, Evergreen Middle School and Bridgemont High School Classes
Elementary and middle school classes have been working on culinary skills and planning for their field trip to Washington DC between working on their academic lessons. Some are already taking practice classes from Bridgemont to prepare for the transition to high school in the fall. Bridgemont is a very rigorous program but our students think the challenge is great!
They took the lead, as always, in our school-wide Asian Celebration, leading the parade, with prepared dance moves. They made glass noodles and decorated the Sanctuary so it resembled China Town in San Francisco.
Their end of year trips are aimed at a culminating experience drawing together all of the skills they have been honing over the school year and planning, organizing and financing the trips themselves.
Friday field trips have lately included rock climbing, skiing and ice skating. a typical day in class includes students working on academics, making candles and soap for their candle and soap shop, working on the latest creation at the maker spaces, working on a sketch, laying out the Timeline of Life from trilobites to humans, talking out a problem, researching an idea or setting a record for the balance board.
Dr. Montessori said that education should be a preparation for life, not just an academic preparation, but an education that includes refining the senses, hands-on learning at all levels including caring for oneself, the environment and others and following interests as far as they lead. Elementary and middle and high school students often work at an academic level far beyond what is offered in traditional schools, but more importantly, they very often love what they are learning.
