Month: October 2025

Project work at Saklan drives strong academic outcomes through creating units where students feel represented and included. Building this deep sense of belonging begins with our specific Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programming, like family groups and Responsive Classroom, and is intentionally woven into our academic PBL units through the equity levers like knowledge of students. 

Knowledge of students means not only building relationships with students but also creating project work that can capture their interests, needs, and strengths. A wonderful example of a unit that is relevant to students’ lives, has meaningful context, and includes robust academic learning is our Kindergarten Names Unit. The driving question for this unit is, “How can we learn and share about our names to become better friends?”

This unit tackles academic standards such as letter and sound correspondence, formulating relevant questions, and listening to and remembering responses to communicate what they have learned with others. To achieve these learning goals, the Names unit maintains high authentic relevancy to honor students’ unique identities through sharing their name stories, which often connect to their family, ancestry, culture, or religious traditions. As they strengthen their classroom community through this work, there are also many authentic opportunities for learning in other content areas too. 

This week, while students focused on how to spell, read, and write each other’s names, they also began to sort their names in a variety of ways. They compared names by looking at letter shape (whether they are tall, short, or ascending), identified names with certain vowels and consonants, and ultimately arranged them by the number of letters each has in a class bar graph. Students eagerly engaged in rich math conversations all stemming from the authentic work of sharing about and reading each other’s names. 

Grounding academic content in what really matters to students allows them to learn at deep levels and feel part of our Saklan school community. 

Join us on October 21st for a Saklan Projects virtual event! We will talk about how teachers design and implement units like this one across all content areas in our Lower School and Middle School. This event is open to all!

#SaklanProjects