Category: Specialists

A Shrek-Tastic Success

A big congratulations to our amazing middle school students on their wonderful performance of Shrek The Musical, Jr. at Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette last Friday evening. From the hilarious characters to the toe-tapping songs and heartfelt moments, the cast and crew brought the story to life with creativity, talent, and heart. Bravo to everyone involved for a truly unforgettable show!

Special thanks to the many people who helped make the show happen.

  • To Town Hall Theatre for their grace in allowing us to share their beautiful and historic space. We are so grateful to be a part of your community.
  • To Javier Yacarini, for his work on the sets.
  • To Jayme Feldhammer for her time, sewing machine, and deep kindness.
  • To Emily and Shay for their help with the program.
  • To Kim Parks for all her help and organization.
  • To the Middle School Teachers for their help with props and rehearsals, their willingness to share their class time, and their encouragement of all performers.
  • To the Middle School Parents for helping their performers run lines and gather their base costumes.
  • To the Middle School Students for their creativity, courage, and humor. Your performance was inspiring!
  • To Dianne for all the hard work, dedication, and passion put into the show. Your casting created magic on the stage and allowed the students to shine bright. Inspiring middle school students to share their creativity, compassion, and courage on the stage is no easy feat, but you did it with ease. Thank you!

Join Us for the Middle School Musical

The Saklan Middle School students are very excited for their culminating project for music class, a performance of Shrek The Musical Jr. Every student in the Middle School is participating in the production, whether it is acting in a main role, taking care of props, helping with costumes, or being a stagehand. The show is a true collaborative effort! 

On Friday, May 16th, the students will perform at 7:00 p.m. in the Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette. The entire community is invited to the show. Tickets are required for attendance and can be purchased by clicking the button below.

Middle School Musical Tickets

We hope you can join us for what is sure to be a wonderful show!

#SaklanMusicals #SaklanCreative

Día del Niño

The Spanish-speaking world is vibrant with music, art, literature, and cherished traditions. At Saklan, learning Spanish goes beyond vocabulary and grammar, and includes cultural understanding and global empathy. Exploring cultural practices helps students appreciate why they are learning Spanish and gives them insight into the values and contributions of Spanish-speaking communities around the globe.

One such tradition is Día del Niño (Children’s Day), a holiday celebrated in many Spanish-speaking countries to make children feel special, loved, and appreciated. In Mexico and other parts of Latin America, this day is recognized annually on April 30th and honors the role children play in families and society.

To bring this celebration to life, students worked in groups to create their own piñatas! Each group chose a character for their piñata—some favorites included dog paw prints, Lilo, Stitch, and Baby Yoda! Students decorated their piñatas with colorful paper, ribbons, and creative touches.

On Wednesday, the students couldn’t wait to break open their piñatas as a special treat, celebrating not only the language they’re learning, but the rich traditions that come with it.

Watching Our Students Shine

What a wonderful experience it was to gather together at the Lesher Center last Friday to watch our students shine on stage!

Thank you to all of the families for making Friday’s logistics work in order to support the students and watch the performance. 

Thank you to the Saklan students for showcasing your creativity and courage by taking the stage in front of such a large audience and singing your hearts out.

Thank you to the faculty and staff for all of the behind-the-scenes work to prepare for the concert, from your flexibility with the schedule to helping with rehearsals. Your support of your students and encouragement to take the stage is greatly appreciated!

A huge thank you to Erin for guiding our Owlet and Hoot Owl students in sharing their songs with our community! Their excitement, bravery, and pure joy for music lit up the stage, creating a heartwarming and memorable performance. We are so proud of our little musicians!

Thank you to Lauren and Linda for working with the second and third grade students on the gorgeous backdrop. Thank you for your continued PBL work, and for the passion you ignite in our students by elevating their voices and choices.

Thank you to Isaac for sharing your knowledge of traditional Ghanaian drumming with our students. What a delight to see them drumming, singing, and dancing together!

Thank you to Javier for helping set up for rehearsals, creating the boom whackers, moving instruments, and doing it all with a smile. 

Thank you to John Kim for sharing beautiful pictures of the event with us.

And finally, a huge thank you to Dianne for leading her first Saklan Concert with such passion and purpose! The show was incredible, and your dedication helped our students shine bright. We’re so grateful for your talent, guidance, and commitment to bringing music to life at Saklan!

#Saklan Creative #SaklanArts

Mindful Art Making

Students in first through eighth grade entered the new year through a series of therapeutic art activities in art class. Therapeutic art, or mindful art making, focuses on the creative process to relieve stress, calm the mind and body, or spark joy. Stepping out of winter break and into a new semester of learning and academic structure can stir up a range of feelings (for students, teachers, and families alike), and art can provide an opportunity to express these emotions, thoughts, and experiences in a way that words sometimes cannot. 

For each lesson, students were given a basket full of colorful art supplies and a small packet of drawing and writing prompts centered around reflecting on 2024 and exploring the values and energy they’d like to carry into 2025. Students were encouraged to work through the exercises in any order and to change or adapt the prompt in any way that felt authentic or comfortable to them at that moment. The goal was to connect with themselves and the process rather than create a polished, final product.

The mindfulness mini-unit was a great compliment to this month’s school-wide social-emotional focus: growth mindset. As students began another semester of projects, art making, and learning, Lauren used these activities an opportunity to remind them to approach the journey with curiosity, creativity, and compassion.

Kindergarten Ensemble

In music class, kindergartners are thrilled to be learning to play handbells! They started the year mostly playing and singing in unison, and now student musicians have the opportunity to understand how they can play different parts within an ensemble. While playing handbells, students must track others’ playing and know when they will play their notes to help complete the phrase or song. The class has talked about the different parts of the bells, how to use them safely, and how to get different sounds when playing these instruments. Student musicians have also had the chance to read music on the treble clef for this unit. They use chart paper-sized sheet music so all musicians can look on together!

The music is color-coded to match the bells, allowing students to practice seeing different pitches on the musical staff while matching the colors to play the correct pitch. This scaffolded practice supports their understanding of both what different notes look like on the staff, as well as what they sound like. Since the musicians need to work together as an ensemble to play songs, conducting is essential. Students have been taking turns as the conductor by pointing to the note on the shared giant music sheet as their classmates follow along.

The kindergarten musicians have already been practicing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Down By the Bay,” and the theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. They are eagerly looking forward to what comes next!

#SaklanCollaboration

We Went to Egypt

Written by Guest Blogger & Saklan Science Teacher, Vickie Obenchain

We went to Egypt!! What?! 🇪🇬

Linda and I got to go on a field experience this summer thanks to the Saklan Summer Fund, Global Exploration for Educators Organization (GEEO), and Columbia University. We aimed to learn and explore Ancient Egyptian history, art, engineering, the Sahara Desert environment, and the Nile ecosystem firsthand. For this science teacher, I was completely blown away each day by the feats of engineering we saw, the connections I found to my curriculum, and how history came alive in a modern era. I’d love to share with you a few examples, knowing this experience will definitely find its way into many more grades and topics. First, the Sahara Desert climate is incredibly harsh, especially in July and August. Temperatures are over 100°F daily, creating hot winds, hot sand, no water, and almost no plant life, except for when your eyes play tricks on you, creating a mirage. Being out in it for more than an hour, as a human, was not comfortable.  

However, the camel’s body is equipped to deal with all my body can not. Camels have two rows of long eyelashes and bushy eyebrows, which help protect their eyes from sand. Yet, if some sand does make its way into their eye, they can dislodge it with a translucent third eyelid (very helpful since they weren’t gifted hands). Camels have slit-like nostrils that can close to keep sand out of their respiratory systems, and when they do come across a dry, thorny desert plant, they have thick, tough lips that help them eat it without hurting themselves. 

The long, shaggy fur on top of a camel’s body works as shade, as the thin fur elsewhere helps them lose heat. They have wide, flat feet with thick soles that help them walk easily across sand and spread their weight so they don’t sink (much like a snowshoe). Their long, tall legs keep their bodies off the hot sand and allow air to circulate under them.

Camels store energy-rich fat in their humps allowing them to survive for months without eating. And they can drink large amounts of water at once, sometimes up to 32 gallons, and they can retain that water in their bodies until their next big gulp.

Experiencing their height,  grace, and adaptations up close was definitely a highlight for your temperate climate loving teachers.  This first hand experience of the camel and experience in the Sahara Desert will tie in wonderfully to my 6th grade desert biome unit and adaptations of those organisms that live there.

Second, very early one morning,  Linda and I left the group tour and decided to do an extra excursion. We hot air ballooned over the west bank of Luxor. After checking wind speed and direction, to make sure we didn’t end up in the Nile (or at the airport), the hot air balloons blasted heated air into the colorful balloons all around us. Once ours was upright, we quickly jumped into the basket and took off. We floated over the many temples, tombs, farms, and the Sahara Desert in this beautiful area. Just WOW!

In my physical science course, the 8th graders create hot air balloons to help test the force of buoyancy and see both Archimedes Principle and Charles Law (aka: thermal expansion) to better understand fluid laws in their Chemistry class. Using paper, glue and tape, they engineer their own balloons that they think will create the largest lift when filled with heated air.  We were a bit nervous to take part in this, but it was so awesome to see science at work to give us such an amazing experience in such a beautiful space.

If interested in seeing more of what we saw, learned, and wanted to share, checkout the Instagram account: missopetsapenguin.

#SaklanProfessionalDevelopment

Pan con Tomate

In Spanish class, students often combine aspects of the Spanish curriculum with other subjects to show how learning a language goes beyond the classroom. Take Spanish and food, for example. Students’ knowledge evolves when they are exposed to different Spanish-speaking countries in the classroom, but that doesn’t compare to tasting what it would be like to be in Spain. Sometimes, the best way to learn is through different experiences, and students love food! In the Middle School Blue Block Spanish class, students prepared pan con tomate, a typical appetizer of Cataluña, a community in Spain. It is a relatively simple recipe with few ingredients required, but the payout is outstanding; the students learn vocabulary while eating and sharing the food they prepare themselves! 

30 Minutes to Launch

The fifth grade students recently wrapped up their hands-on space unit, taught by Ms. O, with a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) challenge to design and build a rocket. When students work in teams, they learn and practice desirable “soft skills” such as active listening, clear communication, cooperation, and flexibility, whilst also learning the “hard-skill” academics – both are valuable for life, hence rockets were designed and built in partner-teams.  Each team had access to a soda bottle, lightweight card, tape in many colors, markers, and scissors.  They also had two constraints: time and weight, and had to make decisions around those factors, while building a launchable rocket in under 30 minutes.

Check out the teams, rockets, and smiles following successful launches here at the Saklan Space Station in the images below!

#SaklanHandsOn

The Studio Habits of Mind

As the K-8 art teacher, there’s a lot of variation in my day. One class period I’m singing a song about how to make green, another I’m teaching 3-point perspective drawing. One thing that stays consistent throughout the day, however, is my philosophy that an artist is largely made in how they make their art, not just in the quality of what they are making. To support this mindset in my classroom, I use something called “The Studio Habits of Mind.”

The Studio Habits of Mind is a research-based framework that helps students navigate the many steps and routines of the creative process. The Studio Habits were developed through Harvard’s Project Zero in the early 2000’s. Lois Hetland and a team of researchers studied the habits of practicing artists and high school art students and identified eight Studio Habits which include: Develop Craft, Engage & Persist, Envision, Express, Observe, Reflect, Stretch & Explore and Understand the Art World. They found that these habits help artists improve their art skills, problem solve, and provide concrete language for the thinking process that happens during art making. 

Something I love about the Studio Habits is how universal they are across grade levels and subjects. Kindergarten is currently learning to Understand the Art World by studying how artists show feelings in their artwork without using words. Middle schoolers are also deepening their understanding of the art world through looking at how Surrealist artists used linear perspective to create mysterious and sometimes impossible spaces. Students can develop their craft of singing in music class, engage and persist on a challenging problem in math class, or stretch and explore different ways to throw and catch a ball in PE. Studio Habits create a universal language of learning that can be used by anyone in any environment. 

Most importantly, the more that I weave the Studio Habits into my teaching, the more I have seen a shift in how students define success. Maybe they’re still working on their craft mixing the perfect shade of green, or drawing a tree-house in 2-point perspective, but they can leave the classroom feeling proud that they stretched themselves to try something new, and engaged and persisted, even when things were hard.