Fierce. Teachers. Ready for kids.

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the Weekly Bulletin! We have had an extraordinary first week, as you will soon read.

Building up to it, as we have done every year, the teachers spent August “Staff Week” gathering and working on their opening plans. How will we co-create with the students, authentically, lovingly, with engagement? And especially, this year, in this new building, on this new campus... Essentially, before the kids arrived, we played and dreamt and busted our butts to create a beginning worthy of the students’ bottomless energy and curiosity.

One morning during Staff Week, I gave the Primes, Mups/Middles, Uppers, Student Support Services and After School teams a prompt to work from: what could the motto/ethos/ideology be for your classroom? I asked them to take half an hour to create a representation of this. I gave them poster paper, and said they could bring props or other pieces into their representations. Here are some of their creations (along with pictures and video):

Mups and Middles focused on ways that building community and sharing our needs and differences with one another creates a safe environment for learning: knowing ourselves as learners is key.

The Preschool Primes team read the children’s book We Move Together for their inspiration.

Looking at the interconnection and balancing of:

• Everyone needs different things/We move together

• Knowing yourself/Within a group/on your own

• Safety/Risk

The Forest and Lumber Primes asked the question "How are we Connected?" and seek to answer that question through stories and maps and a deep connection to nature. Embedded in their ideology is the understanding that kids want to figure stuff out: How does this work? Where are we? That's what invites agency.

Uppers created a flag with different symbols, referring to the South African Flag the Y symbolizing unity, and connection, which in their version looks like part river, part human body, part tree. Like in the Preschool Primes, we see the balancing in the joined hands showing the dialectics at play in good learning:

Interdependent/ independent, community/individuality, ease/hard things, heart/head

This school is in good hands with such incredibly creative, loving, and committed teachers. They love learning. They love kids. They bring passion to their classrooms, which is mirrored and expanded by their students.

Here's to a great year ahead,

Charlie Spencer

Head of School