Category: General

A Humble Suggestion Regarding Your Child’s First Semester Report

Families of K-8 students received a newly formatted report a few days ago that is meant to help students focus on growth. If you look at the second half of the document you will notice the narrative portion has significant detail sharing your child’s successes and challenges in a particular subject. For many of the reports, there is a section of “next steps” which is meant to help a student focus on at least one area for growth.  

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As a parent, the information is to help you understand your child as a learner, but it is also written for your child. We empower our students when we read through the report together and celebrate the accomplishments while also taking on board the challenges. More importantly, the conversation of areas for growth help to give students agency over their academic life, while also creating a partnership between child, parent, and school. So go ahead and read the report with your child, celebrate the success while supporting the challenges.

#SaklanAcademics

Join Team Saklan Suns For Clean Air

fight for air climb

The Saklan School is participating in the American Lung Association’s Fight for Air Climb on Saturday, March 7th. We are calling all parent and student climbers to join Team Saklan Suns for Clean Air led by Team Captain Ryan Lo (6th grade). If you are interested, please sign up here. Our goal is to have at least 12 climbers to show our strong support for cleaner air and healthier environment.

Here is one student’s take on why he is climbing: “I’m climbing because I don’t think there are enough young people making a difference and showing that they care about air pollution. I want to help raise money for programs and research that will help lessen pollutants including vaping pollutants, chemical pollutants, and industrial pollutants.” – Ryan Lo

Please consider joining Team Saklan Suns for Clean Air on Saturday, March 7th in San Francisco to show your support for a cleaner environment!  Thank you.

#SaklanSunsForCleanAir

Alumni Corner

James Rokas started playing guitar the summer before 5th grade when he began taking lessons from Mr. Prestianni. It has been a passion of his ever since!

After graduating from Saklan in 2012, James went to San Ramon Valley High School where he continued playing guitar in Jazz Band all four years. He also broadened his musical interests by playing cello in Orchestra (recommended to him by Mrs. Chaffey) and playing percussion in the Marching Band.

After high school, James decided to follow his passion for guitar and music by pursuing a degree from the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. As a jazz performance major at Thornton, James has enjoyed performing in multiple ensembles including jazz combo, big band and Afro-Latin jazz. He has also written many jazz big band arrangements.

James R

Another big part of his experience as a student at USC has been as a member of the Trojan Knights, an organization known as the official hosts and guardians of traditions at USC. If you watch college football you may have seen James on the sidelines in body paint cheering on the Trojans!

James

He is currently getting ready to graduate in May with a degree in Jazz Guitar Performance and a minor in Music Industry. After graduation, James is planning to pursue graduate studies at UCLA for Film Scoring and working in the music industry.

#SaklanAlum

Event Recommendations for the Weekend

Sticking around for the three-day weekend? Check out these great art exhibits.

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Bedford Gallery at the Lesher Center for the Arts

1601 Civic Dr, Walnut Creek, CA 94596

Tuesday – Sunday 12pm-5pm

Adult $5, Youth 13-17 $3, Children 12 & under free.

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MLK Day of Service Fair

January 20, 12–4 pm | Oak Street Plaza

In honor of MLK Day, OMCA will be offering visitors an opportunity to connect with local social justice organizations who will share information about their work and how to get involved. Enjoy a free one-hour performance by The Marcus Shelby Quartet from 1–2 pm honoring Dr. King and the legacy of the work of Civil Rights leaders and other activists.

Participating organizations include: CARECEN (Central American Resource Center), Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, League of Women Voters of Oakland providing voter registration, the US Census, and Marcus Shelby.

The Service Fair is free and open to the public. Gallery admission is not included.

#SaklanExperiential

Geometry Is Building Polyhedra

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As part of the traditionally high school course, Aaron (8th) is hard at work making a variety of different prisms, pyramids, and other polyhedral as he investigates the relationship between the number of vertices, edges and faces. If you look closely at the picture, you should see a regular tetrahedron, a cube, and a regular octahedron (or as regular as you can get with toothpicks and sour cherry balls.)

He then used the pattern he found (vertices + faces = edges + 2) to learn more about different octahedrons, heptahedrons, and dodecahedrons.

Transam

The lessons continue with the Geometry students finding surface area and volume of many different shapes, and concludes with finding the amount of cleaning solution required to clean the outside of the TransAmerica pyramid in San Francisco!

#SaklanHandsOn

See Some Art This Holiday Break!

Take the family on a trip to see some of these great exhibits happening in the Bay Area! There will be plenty to talk about over dinner. 🙂 Check Holiday hours and special exhibit showtimes, pricing, tours, workshops, etc. before heading to the museum. Attached is the exhibitions link to each museum, as there are plenty of other awesome exhibits and permanent collections at each of these museums.

Enjoy!

  1. Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)

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No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man

October 12, 2019–February 16, 2020

Marvel at the spectacular artwork and large-scale installations from one of the most widely-celebrated cultural events in the world when No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man takes over OMCA.

* Friday nights @ OMCA

From 5–10 pm every Friday night, the Museum has special programming, food trucks, live music, and more.

https://museumca.org/exhibitions

  1. Exploratorium – SF

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Curious Contraptions

Nov.21 – Jan. 26th

Curious Contraptions explores small, surreal worlds through fantastical, often amusing mechanical sculptures known as automata. These whimsical flying, sailing, and cycling machines are brought to life by intricate arrangements of handmade cams, cranks, and other simple mechanisms. Each sculpture performs an absurd miniature drama while also reflecting its maker’s worldview and sense of humor. Exposed inner workings and low-tech mechanisms invite the viewer to understand how each one comes to life.

https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/calendar/ongoing

  1. DeYoung Museum – SF

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Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983

Nov. 5th – Mar. 15th

This internationally acclaimed exhibition, organized by Tate Modern, celebrates art made by Black artists during two pivotal decades when issues of race and identity dominated and defined both public and private discourse. The de Young’s presentation includes a focus on Bay Area artists whose work promoted personal and cultural pride, collective solidarity and empowerment, and political and social activism.

https://deyoung.famsf.org/exhibitions

  1. California Academy of Science – SF

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‘Tis the Season for Science: Life on Ice

The Academy’s annual holiday exhibit, explores the remarkable adaptations that allow Arctic and Antarctic flora and fauna to thrive in such extreme ecosystems. This year, you can marvel at one such live animal without having to travel to the tundra: See how reindeer are uniquely equipped to migrate incredible distances each year—on foot, contrary to popular belief…

https://www.calacademy.org/exhibits-events

#SaklanWellRounded

Why We Give?

Darby family

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

¿Que Tiempo Hace Hoy?

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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