Saklan’s Eighth Grade Learns Financial Literacy

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In Leadership class, it is important that our eighth grade students learn about the real world. One way that we prepare our students is by bringing a financial expert into Saklan to run an hour and a half workshop. Our expert and current parent, Ana Darby, has volunteered her time for the past two years to help educate our future adults.

Ana has developed a curriculum that is accessible to teens. She teaches them about creating a budget as soon as they have any income. Within that budget structure, she advises that they put 10% of their income into a savings or retirement account, even as young as thirteen years old. Mrs. Darby also discusses the importance of giving back through charitable donations, if that is a possibility. Next, students learn to read and understand a bank statement and how credit works. Finally, the most meaningful activity the students do is to be randomly assigned a particular profession. This year’s choices were doctor, cashier, computer programmer, and veterinarian. Each student was given a set income, a list of expenses, and a budget template. They were required to make choices about how they were going to spend their money and type up a monthly budget. Needless to say, most students were shocked how expensive everything was. Overall, each student seemed to have more of an appreciation of how hard their parents work. #SaklanWellRounded

News from the Sports Court

The Saklan Suns basketball away team played two games this week. Monday’s game was in El Sobrante against the East Bay Waldorf School; and Tuesday’s game was in Berkeley against The Berkeley School.

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The games were an awesome basketball field experience. Good job to all the players who participated! The team has two games left during the last week of March. These games will be played here at home so come on out and cheer on the Saklan Suns! #SaklanWellRounded

Lower School Students See the Play “Brooklyn Bridge”

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On Thursday, March 7th, the 4th and 5th grade embarked on a journey down the hill into Lafayette to visit our local community theater, Town Hall Theater. We experienced a beautiful play called “Brooklyn Bridge,” which on the surface seems to be about a 5th grade girl trying to find a pen so she can write a report, but is really about human connectedness and the small things that bring us all together. The students were able to ask the actors questions after, and for our Saklan students, they were able to tie the experience of actors they saw to their own memory of what it feels like to be on stage.

Different students were able to understand the play on different levels. There were moments of stillness and silence when the meaning of the play reached their hearts, and all of them laughed at the “plant moving people.” Experiencing such beautiful theater so close by is thrilling, and helps our students to understand that they are a part of the larger artistic community in Lamorinda and the East Bay. They walked away joyful, inspired, and empowered. Many thanks to Town Hall Theater for hosting us! #SaklanExperiental

Sarah’s Science Visits Saklan

The first and second graders were very fortunate to have special guest Sarah Shaffer of Sarah’s Science visit their classroom this week. The students all became scientists as they delved into the world of electricity, what it is and how it works.

As they did that, they each built their own secret pressure pad to sound an alarm when someone enters the room. We are sure they will come in very handy at home! #SaklanHandsOn

Inside the Egg

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Hoot Owls learned about the 21 day embryonic development of a chicken. The children took turns opening pretend eggs that show pictures of the changes occurring inside an egg. Hoot Owls shared the picture inside the egg with classmates during circle-time. Together they talked about what specific changes they noticed from egg to egg. The whole class cheered when they opened egg number 21 and a small toy chick popped out!

They explored the eggs a little more closely by choosing four very different stages of egg development to study and draw. Hoot Owls decided that the beginning cluster of cells should be called, “The Little Nothing Stage.” They appropriately named the second transformation, “The Little Blah-Blah Stage.” #SaklanHandsOn

Shooting Rockets

Since February, the 8th grade has been learning physics in Science class. They have been learning about the forces on our planet: gravity, air resistance, friction and centripetal force. They have also been working on putting Newton’s three Laws of Motion into real life scenarios.

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In one example of this, the 8th grade had to create a rocket that could fight air resistance and gravity, and that could exhibit all of Newton’s three laws. After creating different paper airplanes and learning how different designs create different amounts of drag, their goal was to design a rocket that could not only defy gravity, but go the highest in the class.

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They worked in pairs to design different wings and different types of cones for the top of their rockets. When the time came to shoot them off, they used an altimeter to measure their height as they blasted off. While each reached amazing heights, one rocket design made it an astonishing 39 meters in the sky (approximately 128 feet), a first for the 8th grade rocket experiment. Congrats, Max and Harrison on your design! #SaklanHandsOn

The Big, Bad, Blow-Dryer Challenge

Kindergartners favorite fairy tale has been The Three Little Pigs. The children have been busy retelling the story using props. They love to huff and puff! Finally, the class had a lot of fun taking the Big, Bad, Blow-dryer Challenge.

Working in pairs, the children chose building materials needed to build a house. They made a diagram of how they wanted their house to look and predicted if their house would withstand the Big, Bad, Blow-dryer Challenge. The children then built their houses and the Big, Bad, Blow-dryer tried to blow down their houses.

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Every house survived the Big, Bad, Blow-dryer Challenge. The children were very proud! #SaklanHandsOn

Field Experience at San Francisco Symphony

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On Tuesday, March 5th, the Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades went out to explore our Bay Area community by traveling to the San Francisco Symphony. They attended a concert called “Play Me a Story,” designed to help students identify different sounds made by each unique instrument, and connect them to characters or events in a story. The students and teachers then heard a program that introduced them to the Overture from “Barber of Seville” by Rossini, “Elephants” by Camille Saint-Saens, and “Scheherezade” and “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korskov, amongst others.

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The musicians in the symphony expertly demonstrated to our students how a flute can be a bird, how and oboe can be a duck, how a group of violins can be a swarm of bumblebees, and how a trombone and trumpet conversation can be a battle! Everybody’s favorite moment was when the percussion section played us the story of a ship crashing against the rocks!

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Introducing children to instrumental music at an early age is so important, but amongst the laundry list of reasons, one stands out; helping children experience the Symphony in person helps them understand fully that music is played by humans, not by computers, phones, or Alexa. Going outside our school gates and realizing that it is with our own bodies and brains that we create beauty helps our children realize that they too can create art, music or something beautiful, and that it is not out of their reach. For Saklan students, the experience helped them understand concepts reinforced every day in their classrooms and allows them to make a career connection into the greater community.

We 💜 SF Symphony! #SaklanExperiental

Head’s Corner

Why Do We Have a GPSF Day?

Many of you know that I am the father of a 14-month-old toddler who goes by the name Finn. She came to my wife and me by what we like to call a “spontaneous pregnancy.” Children were never part of our life plan and we had absolutely no clue what an impact a child would have on us (emotionally, physically and financially). Furthermore, we had no idea of the support one needs when raising a little human.

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I bring this up not because I like to talk about Finn (although I do), but because I never understood the importance of a support network when it comes to raising a family.  I have come to learn that extended families serve at least two crucial roles in my family’s well being. The first of course is the emotional and hands-on support they give. The second, and just as important, is as a role model. I have lost count of the number of times I have thought about how my siblings or parents did their child rearing to help guide me in my efforts .

I bring this up because having a child has made me see Grandparents and Special Friends Day in a new light.  As educators, we spend over seven hours a day with your sons and daughters. We work to partner with you and keep you up-to-date and support you in this complicated world of child raising. But sometimes we are unfamiliar with a key component of the equation – the grandparent or special friend. I have always enjoyed Grandparents and Special Friends Day because our visitors are such neat people, and they are always interested in what is going on at school. But, to be honest, I had not really viewed them as a critical cog in the work of creating a good person.

Hence the importance of Grandparents and Special Friends Day. They are an integral part of your child’s journey (and sometimes the key to your sanity). On the 29th of this month, we look forward to connecting, sharing and honoring those “others” who are so essential to your child’s life. #SaklanConnected