Mixing Magic Color Wheels

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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?

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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

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

Traveling Teddy BearArriving 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

Kindergarten – Tree of Life

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Misheel Javkhlangerel Tree of Love                              Sage Avant Tree of Love

Students have been working with chalk, oil pastels, and watercolor resist techniques in the Art Room. The students had a one day project for them to take home and the inspiration came from Gustav Klimt’s painting, The Tree of Life. The Kinders titled their artwork after explaining what their own tree represented.

The Tree of Life reaches up into the sky and down into the earth. It represents strength, protection, mother nature, wisdom, and beauty. The swirly branches keep your eye wandering and exploring the details in the painting. Using lines to make up the tree, students used oil pastels first and then water colored the whole paper to reveal the resist technique. This creates beautiful results that the students are proud of creating!

#SaklanCreative

Alumni Corner

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This past weekend, Saklan Alum Finn Anders and Sarah Zemmelman performed in Night of January 16th at The Athenian School. Saklan Alum Ada Martin was the production manager for the show and (literally) built the set. What a gift to have their MS teachers there to cheer them on and to reconnect.

We are proud of our alumni and love seeing what they are up to, whether it be in HS, college, or beyond. Follow us on IG, and send us updates or pictures!

#SaklanAlum

Why Do You Donate?

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“Saklan does an OUTSTANDING job of teaching to different learning styles. That my second grader can take charge of her learning by choosing which math activity she wants to do, that she can work on it lying on the floor or sitting on a ball, that she does work both independently and with partners and in groups, and that she is learning how it applies to the REAL WORLD makes my heart happy on a daily basis.

And I would be remiss if I did not sing the praises of our specialist teachers. Our kids get to make sugar skulls, engage in hopscotch tournaments and perform on stage in professional settings. And hats off to Mrs. Chaffey – last year I had to bite my tongue. A dear friend’s daughter was saying how at her school concert they were doing Disney songs – and I SO wanted to respond that ‘yeah, we’re playing African drums and singing slave spirituals and the kindergartners are learning songs from the Depression and our whole school is doing songs about perseverance and teamwork and classic country songs’ but somehow I thought that might just sound  a teeny tiny bit snobbish? Maybe? Just a bit? 

I’ve also seen tremendous changes in the Parents Association this year. I LOVE having themed meetings once a month. It really makes me motivated to go! And the blog just seems to be getting better and better and I really appreciated what was said at back to school night: The school could run on tuition alone, you could keep the lights on and pay salaries but that would be about where it ended. That by us parents helping out, our kids get to go on experiences like the working marine biology research ship, to gold country, and to make sugar skulls! And I remember thinking ‘here’s my wallet – help yourself!’

And last for me, I feel that Saklan loves, supports and appreciates my child. Kaylah is a friendly, bright, creative kid but she has her moments. And I feel like at Saklan, every single teacher has taken those moments and rather than do what as a parent I sometimes want to do which is throw up my hands and say ‘Why can’t you be like other kids?!’, they turn around and say ‘Huh – how do we turn this into something positive. How do we help you be a leader? How do we support whatever it is you’re going through? Because it’s what makes you amazing and special.’ And sometimes it’s through meetings with a teacher, sometimes it’s through family groups, sometimes it’s through general conversations at morning meeting, sometimes the solution is a mix of a whole bunch of stuff. But I feel like whatever happens, Saklan’s got my back and they’re there to catch Kaylah when she stumbles and challenge her and reward her and encourage her.”

Tara Nemeth and Timothy Grammer

Kaylah (2nd)

#SaklanGiving

Head’s Corner

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Guest Experts – Lighting The Fire 

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” – William Butler Yeats

One of the touchstones of a Saklan education is making experiential learning the center of getting students engaged in academics. While we all can learn from a book, a lecture or a video, it is the in-person experience that lights the fire.

Experiential learning can be as big as swimming with turtles in the Galapagos (as many of our students did this past summer) or as simple as visiting the Moraga Gardens Farm to learn about plant life. Each is an example of getting outside of the box and into the real world and getting your hands dirty.

But there is another type of experiential learning that is as powerful, the Guest Expert.  We practice taking our students outside our four walls – but bringing the outside world into Saklan can have just as powerful of an impact.

This is where you come in…

We have begun to assemble a list of guest experts that we would love to have in our classrooms and we are reaching out for help. Maybe you are the expert, or maybe you know someone. If you or someone you know has knowledge in one of the fields or areas attached, please contact me at doconnell@saklan.org. We can start a conversation about how you can help us light some fires.

Warm regards,

David

P.S. We use the word expert lightly; one does not need to have a PhD to be an expert, just some experience and a willingness to share knowledge.

#SaklanExperiential

Understanding The 5-D Process

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The 7th grade has been continuing their use of variables to represent an unknown number in a variety of contexts. In this chapter Mr. Zippin introduced the 5D Process as a new method to solve problems that our previous methods were too challenging or too time consuming to solve. In the 5D Process, the students carefully read the problem and write the important parts and relevant information in the Describe part. This is also the place where they could draw a picture if that would be helpful to solve for the unknown.

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The second D is the Define columns where the students carefully label the elements of the problem and define what they will be guessing. Mr. Zippin stresses that the columns must be carefully labeled and filled in with full math operations. The Do column is the place where they write out the full mathematical expression. The Decide column of their table is where the seventh graders check their answer with what they are trying to find and then decide what a good next guess would be. Finally, they end with a Declare that answers the question being asked by the problem.

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As they continue to use the 5D Process, they begin to add an additional line to our table, the variable. The students begin to recognize that the variable expression can be used to summarize the relationships in the 5D process. As they continue with the work, the seventh graders will write full single variable equations and solve them from words problems.

#SaklanAcademic

Learning With Pumpkins

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Hoot Owls practiced some of the steps from the scientific method this month. First, they created a hypothesis when Miss Traci asked the Hoot Owls, “How many seeds are inside the pumpkin?” guesses ranged from zero to trillions!

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The children collected data by counting the seeds into piles of ten. During circle-time, they counted all the seeds by 10’s together. They found that there were 493 seeds inside the pumpkin. Hoot Owls also practiced the concept of more or less when the teacher asked them if their guess was more or less than 493.

Hoot Owls learned about perspective with their first still life project of the year. They were asked to draw only what they could see while working on life-like drawings of three pumpkins. Miss Jessica helped the Hoot Owls pay close attention to small details and differences between the pumpkins. She asked that the Hoot Owls didn’t move the pumpkins because it would change the perspective of their art and their friend’s art. To help the Hoot Owls understand the concept of perspective a little more they read They All Saw a Cat by Brendan Wenzel. In this story a cat walks through the world, but the illustrations of the cat look very different depending on which animal is looking at the cat!

#SaklanHandsOn