This Week in Sally's Core

Dear 8th grade families and friends!

We’re off to a predictably busy start in 8th grade! In an effort to keep you abreast of what's afoot so you can stay ahead...I'll do my best to post weekly reports to let you know what we've been doing in our Language Arts / Humanities cores.

In this week we sharpened our focus on the original Renaissance Man, Leonardo da Vinci and his concept of "Curiosità," defined as "an insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning." Our goal is to emulate Leo's insatiable curiosity as we explore the many facets of our 8th grade year. Having each recorded one hundred "burning questions" in our Curiosità Journals, we're now in the process of generating ten "power questions" per student - i.e., ten questions from our one hundred that seem the most important or pressing. I look forward to assembling, surveying and then discussing these questions on Monday. We will work extensively with these “power questions” and will spend significant time reflecting on them in our journals.

In addition to Leonardo's concept of Curiosità, we delved more deeply into self-examination and awareness through our recent teambuilding / "True Colors Workshop," conducted by facilitator, Chris Youngberg of Canfield and Associates. Our students determined their personal array of colors - complete with personality traits and tendencies. Be sure to ask your 8th grader whether she's primarily a gold, orange, blue or green...and what it all means! We will return to their findings as we work on teambuilding throughout the year. We also discussed and experienced Dr. Martin Seligman's online "Signature Strengths" assessment (see "Authentichappiness.org" for more details) and will return to these results as well as we seek to capitalize on our innate strengths rather than lament our ubiquitous deficits!

Our "Word-of-the-Day" (henchforth referred to as WOD) routine is already well entrenched with impressive results. Basically 8th graders encounter words in their every day dealings that alternately intrigue or perturb them...and then each student investigates said word as her own individual "WOD." The student then brings her WOD to her table, where one word is selected by the members of each table group for an all-group consideration. Today alone we discussed such words as penury, epithets, calamity, allocation, and - my all-time favorite - sycophant!

Looking ahead, in two week’s time the 8th grade will begin a reading/writing/reflecting project called "The Significant Adult Book Reflection." Basically, each girl will approach a "significant adult" in her life and ask what book particularly impressed him/her when he/she was her age. Then the student will read that book, conduct an in-depth, guided interview, and then
write a reflection paper about that experience. Soooo...in the off chance that your 8th grader might consider YOU a "significant adult," I wanted to give you fair warning!

See many of you at Flight Day...my fingers are crossed for cloudless skies and gentle breezes!

Sally