The Saklan School Friday Blog

News From The Sports Court

“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.”
– Molière

One of the core tenets of The Saklan School is courage. Five Saklan students took a risk and ran a foot race against peers from other schools around the Lafayette Reservoir. This cross country event was grueling. The distance around the lake is about 2.5 miles with a lot of up and down terrain.

Last Tuesday evening was the Fourth Annual Cross Country Invitational Meet. The Saklan School usually finishes well at this event and this year’s race was the fastest yet. A special shout-out to: Mac, Nick, Phoebe, Reese, and Thomas for completing this challenging adventure.

Let’s go Saklan!

#SaklanWellRounded

Math Starts With Counting

Kindergarten is just completing Unit 4 of the Math program. They are busy with numbers 0-10. A child is said to have concrete knowledge of numbers up to their age. Observe your child counting a large number of objects. It is common to see a child recognize the correct number of objects, 0-5, without needing to count, but when there are more objects, 6-10+, children will skip objects and/or count objects more than once. A child may recognize the number 8, but not really know how many 8 is the way we as adults can quickly recognize 8 of something by breaking 8 down to 4 and 4, etc.

Therefore, in Kindergarten many activities are used to break down the numbers so the children can have more concrete knowledge. This concrete knowledge is actually the beginning of addition and subtraction. They have been completing 10 frames every tenth day since the start of school. During morning bin time, the children have been building 10 frames. One Math time activity involved counting the dots on dominoes and sorting them. The next Unit covers numbers up to 31 and the fun will continue!

#SaklanHandsOn

6th Grade Builds Volcanoes

The 6th grade has been learning about different types of volcanoes and their parts, where they are located, what type of eruptions occur, dangers and advantages of living by active volcanoes and how they create different rocks and formations. Students looked at different types of igneous rocks, tested different fluid viscosity to see how different lavas might flow, and then built their own shield volcano and tested off different batches of “magma.” They determined the speed of flow, what minerals make the lava flow slower and how those different flows cool into different rocks.

After they learned about historic volcanoes and ones we still might want to be concerned about. It was a lot of fun!

#SaklanWellRounded

Head’s Corner

In my humble opinion, Giving Tuesday should be placed one week earlier, before Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. It would make more sense that an idea that is now a global movement of giving and generosity should precede anything else and propel us forward with gratitude for Thanksgiving and the holidays.

It’s too late to change this order this year, but it is my hope that as a community we can make a statement and give boldly on this Giving Tuesday – spreading hope and inspiration to each other. More importantly, we will be helping create a generation that will put empathy and compassion before shopping.

The core of what we do every day at Saklan is to help students develop the mindset and tools to be bold world changers. Our ability to do that relies on the fact that you trust us with your children and support us in this endeavor by sacrificing significant financial resources to make it all possible.

Much of the deeper, real-world work we do with students comes from your generosity during our Annual Giving Campaign. 100% of our Board of Trustees and Faculty and Staff have participated in our campaign. To date, 35% of our parent body has participated. Of the remaining 65%, if you are anything like me, the AGF Pledge Form is on the kitchen counter, just waiting to be sent in (go look, it is under the Target bill).

So take a moment to help us create the bold world changers of the future.

With Gratitude,
David

To give online – click here
To download a pledge form – click here

#GivingTuesday

Why We Give?

In our family’s journey at Saklan, from Pre-K through 8th grade, Saklan’s nurturing community of teachers, staff, and families have instilled a love of learning in both of our kids and we truly feel that they receive something priceless each day.

Small class sizes, individualized attention, a culture of care, the celebration of creativity, and high academic expectations. Teachers and staff who know every child and are like family. Science, art, and music in every grade. We brought our daughter, Isabel, to Saklan for Pre-K and all of these elements compelled us to keep her at Saklan throughout. She’s now a thriving freshman at Carondelet High School.

Seeing our daughter blossom, it was an easy decision for our son, Jordan, to also join Saklan in Pre-K. He’s now a maturing 7th grader looking forward to choosing a high school next year.

We support the Annual Giving Campaign because, in each of our family’s 11 years at Saklan, our kids could never wait for their first day of school, and we couldn’t imagine a school for them other than Saklan.

Stuart and Ana Darby

Jordan (7th)

#SaklanGiving

Can You Hula Hoop?

The physical education students have been practicing with hula hoops since the beginning of the year. Did you know that you can build with the hula hoops? Six hoops can be stacked to create a stand alone structure.

The Saklan students didn’t stop with six. During recess, a few ambitious builders have begun to stack the structures. The builders are looking for different locations which will allow them to reach greater heights. The tower is growing to four and five stories! Today, the students broke the record with four stories and this structure will go down in Saklan history!

Let’s go Saklan!

#SaklanWellRounded

Mixing Magic Color Wheels

The Kindergarten is learning about the color wheel! Using Model Magic, the students mixed their own secondary colors (Orange, Green, Purple) using equal parts of the primary colors (Red, Yellow, Blue). They enjoyed mixing the colors with their hands and seeing the magic happen right before their eyes! In this exercise, students can create a wide range of colors fairly quickly and understand the amount of each color it takes to create others. While the model magic is still soft, they can break off a little of one and another color to make more colors like yellow-orange, blue-purple, green-blue, etc. (More yellow than orange will make yellow-orange, more blue than green will make blue-green, etc.)

Students were sent home with their model magic color wheels to play with color mixing! This is the most non-messy and tactile way of learning how to mix colors, not to mention the cool sculptures they can make with this material. If the model magic is left out and not placed back in the bag, IT WILL DRY OUT! So make a fun sculpture before it hardens! Here is just one idea: if the kids mix many colors they can attach all spheres to make a caterpillar!

In the following weeks, students will read from The Day the Crayons Quit by Oliver Jeffers to create their own story and artwork behind their favorite color of the color wheel.

#SaklanCreative

¿Que Tiempo Hace Hoy?

Second graders meet for Spanish class 3 times a week for 30 minutes each time. The Spanish courses are taught with an emphasis on interactive activities, stories, poems, songs, and games that are used to introduce vocabulary and commonly used phrases in Spanish. Students also engage in art projects to help them draw associations to the Spanish material as they speak and create. Reinforcement and repetition are used to help retain material.

This past week, students were introduced to vocabulary associated with different seasons and weather. They learned the name of the four seasons in Spanish: el invierno, la primavera, el verano and el otono. The four seasons is a fun topic because there is so much to talk about. First, the students discussed the characteristics of each season. Then, they shared their favorite season and why they liked it. They also created a “dado” (dice) with the different weather types and they asked each other questions such as “¿Que tiempo hace hoy?” (How’s the weather?). These activities gave the second graders lots of opportunities to practice their Spanish.

#SaklanWellRounded

3rd Grade Visits The Museum Of The American Indian

Third graders have been learning about Native Americans and got to enhance their classroom studies by visiting the Museum of the American Indian in Novato. They enjoyed hearing stories about how the Coast Miwok tribe lived harmoniously with the land.

The students got to learn how two types of Miwok homes are built and go inside one of them. They experienced drilling a shell with a pump drill to make a necklace. It was a wonderful experience that really brought their learning to life.

#SaklanExperiential

Traveling Teddy Bear Coming To Saklan

Arriving this week, you will notice a Teddy Bear on campus! This Teddy Bear is named Matteo and is an international traveler. Matteo is part of the Traveling Teddy Bear Project that connects students around the globe! He will be stopping in some of our classrooms and doing activities with our students.

The Traveling Teddy Bears Project was started in 2014 with the goal of connecting young children in classrooms across the globe. This year each of our bears is supporting one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals to help spread awareness in schools around the globe! You can learn more about these goals here: https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030.html

Matteo is the oldest teddy bear to be a part of the Traveling Teddy group. He was born in New Jersey in 2005. He loves traveling, learning about cultures, making friends, learning languages, dancing, and reading. He is ready to travel, learn, make friends, and read to many children around the world. Matteo is also very sporty and enjoys yoga, swimming, baseball, running, and working out. unnamed

Matteo supports Global Goal #4: Quality Education. He believes that everyone deserves to go to school and have opportunities to read, write, and learn!

Matteo is currently in China from there he will be coming to Saklan, then to Ireland, and Canada.

#SaklanConnected

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