App-Y Holidays!

Technology Director T. Kathy is always on the lookout for engaging "apps" to be used for our school's iPads. Teachers use the iPads to enhance our curriculum.

In case you have an iPad at home (or an iPhone) or find youself with one this holiday season, T. Kathy has put together a list of worthwhile educational apps for students of all ages as well as a list of useful tips to consider when using technology (iPads, laptops, phones, etc.) at home.

Useful Tips:
• Establish a strong password for downloading apps to ensure only apps you approve will be downloaded.

•Consider downloading the “lite” or “free” version first, which allows you to decide if the app is worth purchasing.

•Look for how many stars an app has earned; they vary from 1-5 (with 5 being the best). Read several of the customer reviews to be sure the app will be useful for you.

•Some ratings will let you know that the app is still new and prone to crashing. If that is the case, consider waiting to allow the developer to upgrade the app.

•Check the age rating to be sure it is appropriate. For example, some ratings will indicate that an app is meant for ages 3+. This does not necessarily mean it is only good for 3 year olds; think of it like a G movie – suitable for young children, but enjoyed by all ages.

•Time spent on any electronic devices should be monitored and limited. Consider setting up a system in which children earn time to play general games by first spending a pre-determined amount of time using an educational app.

•Be sure to always have your children “un-plug” at least one hour before bedtime. This means NO electronic stimulation. Research has shown that over stimulation leads to trouble falling asleep.

•Remember that nothing replaces snuggling up with a favorite book and reading to your child!

FSMH Holiday Hello

Make a free greeting card

Parenting in a Digital World

On Tuesday night, Friends School Mullica Hill hosted the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office’s Cyber Crimes Unit. Parents heard from Det. Brian Pertricari about Internet safety and the reality of cyber bullying. For those of you who could not make the presentation, Teachers Patti and Nicole wanted to share some pertinent information as well as some outstanding tips on how to keep yourself and your children safe in our digital world. I want to thank T. Patti and T. Nicole for both bringing this presentation to our community and for taking the time to share the following information.

Cyber Bullies
There are different types of online bullies, which the Cyber Crimes Unit describes as “power-hungry bullies,” “mean girls” and “inadvertent bullies” who do not set out to hurt others but do it all the same.   Helping your child identify what is appropriate and inappropriate online banter will help your child identify (and avoid) cyber bullies. If your child is faced with a bullying situation, the detectives suggested Cyberbullying.org and StopCyberBullying.com as two helpful resources.

Online Predators
The presenters also talked openly about online predators who identify themselves as your children’s peers, but are not. The best way to protect your children from interacting with predators is not to “friend” people who you don’t know personally. Have an honest discussion about what is appropriate to share with others – photos, personal information, etc. – even to close friends. Explain that without meaning to, information can get into the wrong hands.

Safety Parameters
1. To help monitor your child’s safety, you should ask you child to share all usernames and passwords with you.  If your child is on Facebook, be sure and have an open conversation with him or her about how Facebook should be used. Show your child the “Privacy & Terms” section as well as the “Data Use Policy” and the section called “Some Other Things” that talks about rights and responsibilities. Because Facebook changes its privacy settings and regulations often, you can “like” the Facebook security, safety and privacy pages so that when there are updates, you will be notified.

2. Have a Mac? Make sure the “sharing” feature is turned off. 

3. Internet safety experts often explain that one of the most important things you can do to keep your child safe is to keep all electronics out of your child’s bedroom. Keeping computers, laptops, etc. in your general family living space allows you to keep better tabs on what your child is busy doing online. 

4. To protect your children (and your own information, especially if you bank online, pay bills, etc.) make sure your wireless network is secure. Google your modem model to find out how to make your wireless router secure so that unwanted visitors do not have access to your information.

Parents of Younger ChildrenFor those parents with young children, this information may feel remote. However, statistics show that children as young as 8 years old tend to begin experimenting with social media. These children should know at the very basic level that there are online dangers. Of course, we want to keep in mind that many of this information can be scary to young children if not presented from a proactive (rather than a reactive) point of view.

Giving Thanks and Giving Back

We truly are blessed at Friends School.  Every day we come to work or study in a caring community where we all have what we need to survive and thrive.  This is a week where we take time out to give thanks for our blessings and to give back to the larger community in service, sharing our good fortune, and thinking and acting beyond our own self-interest.

The core Quaker principles or “Testimonies” are sometimes referred to as “SPICES” because their first initials make this acronym.  They are: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality and Service or Stewardship.  Tomorrow we will come together as an entire student body, with our teachers, staff, and a number of parent volunteers, to share a meal of thanks together.  Before we gather to eat, our partner or buddy classes will meet together for about ½ hour, with older students reading stories to students in the younger grade.  These act of community have become important traditions at Friends School, and ways to celebrate our connections with each other and to reflect on how we care for each other before we head our separate ways for a week.

Besides celebrating community within our own school throughout the week students in different grades have also been engaging in service learning where they reach out to offer service to others.  On Wednesday Sixth Graders visited the Regional Day School to work with students with multiple disabilities or medical issues that make their quest for education more complex than for most of us.  Seventh Graders went to the ARC the same morning to engage with developmentally disabled adults and adolescents.  Besides touching on the chords of community and service, these activities also touch on equality where the core value is our equality in God’s eyes because there is “that of God within each of us.”  How can each of us learn to interact with others unlike ourselves, showing clear respect and empathy in ways that allow us to truly connect?

Other service learning this week included eighth graders clearing litter from an area road to benefit our neighbors and cleaning up the campus, despite a rainy day.  On Friday fifth graders will pack lunch boxes with donated food for the Box Lunch Project.  These boxed meals will be delivered to Food Pantry in Woodbury to be shared with local children who need the nutrition.  Finally on Friday, eighth graders will also volunteer in the afternoon to pack away what is left from the Ten Thousand Villages sale where our community has directed some of its holiday shopping to purchase handcrafted products purchased at fair rates from craftsmen in developing countries who are then able to pay for food, education, housing and healthcare.

As I look back over this week, and forward to next, I reflect on my own gratitude at being part of such an amazing community as Friends School, and being grateful for the opportunity to interact with each of you.   This is truly a place where the core values expressed in the “SPICES” come alive each day.

Civics from Start to Finish

Tuesday was Election Day.  Did you vote?  Not for the Republicans or the Democrats, but for Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Mint Chocolate Chip or Chocolate, among other top favorites.  I’m talking about the Second Grade Ice Cream Election, an annual opportunity for our Second Grade Students to get hands-on experience setting up and running an election, and campaigning for a “candidate,” or in this case, for a flavor.  Research was performed, posters were designed and crafted and speeches were made.  In the end, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough was the winner, for, I think, the second year in a row.

At Friends School we emphasize engaged citizenship from Pre-Kindergarten through Eighth Grade.  The ice cream election is a second grade project-based opportunity for students to combine their written and oral language arts skills with their mathematical and artistic skills in the service of learning social studies.  If you are the parent of a second grade student ask them if anyone sang a jingle or used Spanish in their presentation.  I do know that some speeches did touch on science and the presence of particularly healthful ingredients in particular flavors.

On the other end of the spectrum Eighth Grade Civics is a capstone course in our curriculum.  It is a chance for 8^th graders to focus closely on the U.S. Constitution, U.S. History and what it means to be an engaged citizen researching issues, forming opinions and taking stands on a full range of social and political issues in the United State and abroad.  All of these experiences tie to the Quaker Testimony of Community.  What does it mean to be engaged and caring in your family, your school, your church, your town, your country, or as a citizen of the world?  How can you make a difference?  These lessons start early in life.  Taking your child into the voting booth with you, or voting in the Ice Cream Election are two great ways to get your child started.  Then celebrate with the ice cream flavor of your choice!

United Nations Indeed!

Not only were our Middle School students shining yesterday as they each presented their country at our annual World's Fair, but a group of parents were shining too at the Multi-Cultural Network’s first ever Cultural Cafe.

First the Middle School students were beaming, many in costume, many with multi-media presentations or authentic artifacts from their countries supplementing their poster board displays.  All were answering questions for younger students, parents and teachers.  It is a wonderful tradition to have students engage in this project-based learning, really digging into individual countries and then learning to share what they have discovered.

Across the hall a group of parents of truly diverse backgrounds met over coffee and doughnuts to share stories of their own cultural backgrounds.   The first thing that was evident was that everyone defies labels and stereotypes.  A parent who might be “labeled” African-American has a family tradition of an annual curry cook-off reflecting roots in Malaysia.  She did not share any specific traditions that relate to her also having Native American ancestors.  Another parent talked about a father-in-law whose medical studies were interrupted when he was held as a political prisoner for seven years in Romania.  We discussed the sensitivities of being Scotch-Irish, as compared to Irish and what that might mean if you were in Ireland.  Several parents present talked about being labeled Black or African-American regardless of background, and about ancestors who may have worked to “pass” as white.  If you are Brazilian, you may have roots in many countries, such has Syria or Italy, but you speak Portuguese as your native tongue so you are not really “Hispanic” although you might still identify yourself as Latino or Latina.

Before I lost count, I heard references to ancestral roots in Romania, Lebanon, Brazil, Italy, Lithuania, Ukraine, Malaysia, Ireland, Russia, Syria and the United States (Mississippi, the Navajo tribe and New Jersey).   I know there were more.  Each person had wonderful tales to tell.  At the end of the hour we each left with a better understanding of and a greater respect for the challenges that each speaker faced as they present themselves to the world.  At its core, the real questions were for each of us: “Who am I?”  “Where am I from?”  And, “What do I bring with me from my background?”  It was impressive to see parents model a deep, thoughtful and affirming dialogue about these topics, which are ones we challenge our students to explore throughout their years at Friends School.

Core Values

First of all, a huge thank you to those families who joined me in the past two weeks for “Dinner with Bruce.”  I quite enjoyed a chance to meet with you in a more informal setting.  I also enjoyed the chance to connect over something that is so important to me personally and to our school.  That is how our core Quaker values support and inform what we do and impact our students in such a positive way, both while they are here, and after they graduate and go on to confidently lead purposeful lives.

It is so important for us to be clear about what our core values are as a Friends School, and what this really means in terms of the benefit our students and families receive.  For example, how does the transcendent belief of “that of God” in each of us reflect in how we approach and reveal it in our interactions with the 11 members of our brand new class of three-year-olds?  How does inward reflection in weekly Meeting for Worship translate to a child’s growing self-awareness and self-knowledge?   How does that in turn translate into graduates who are not only academically prepared, but also know more about who they are at their core, and who are inclined to contribute to their local communities and work to change the world for the better?  As a school community we cannot reach the full potential of being a “Friends” school without taking our own time to reflect inwardly, listening for that still small voice that can guide us when we are ready to hear it.   Our teachers are also taking additional time in faculty meetings this fall to reflect on how we can make meeting for worship more accessible for our students.  I’ll have more to report on this in the future.

Online Competition!

Keep your fingers crossed!  The national results come out later today or tomorrow!  Last week we had over 50 students online at one time competing in the American Math Challenge.  This is a national challenge where students log-on to the AMC site and solve math problems.  They get points for correct answers, and the longer they compete, with correct answers, the higher their score.  The unofficial results on the website, as of the time one of our students logged-off at midnight, suggested that TWO of our students, one sixth grader and one seventh grader, MIGHT be in the top 40 in the country.  We have also been told that Friends School finished 19^th nationally for Math Counts schools.

 

It is great to have so many students so charged-up about math.  The right to friendly bragging rights means that our students were both competing for the school and for themselves.  Individual strengths united for the team!  I am told that very shortly we should be able to confirm how our individual students did.

Regardless, however, they had a lot of fun.  (Remember what I shared with you before – Math is Fun!)  Now I do know that the sixth grade teachers did note some lethargy from one of our potential top scorers when he arrived the next morning. I can’t officially condone skipping a reasonable bedtime, but it is exciting to see this level of engagement with a subject some of you may not recall as fun.

On a related note, one of our goals this year is to increase and improve the ways we incorporate technology into our curriculum and lesson plans.  Students are graduating into a digital world and often they are already the leaders in their families in the use of technology.   Thanks to generous support from the Parents' Association we have been upgrading our network and hardware infrastructure to support this work.  Last week we put this to the test with so many students online at one time for the competition.  Many thanks to the PA for helping us engage with the challenge so fully!

Oh, and our potential individual top scorers are sixth grader Alex and seventh grader Justin.  I won’t tell you which one had the higher score.  You can ask them.

Can Studying Art Help a Student Be a Better Doctor?

You may read in the Bulletin this week that our Fifth Graders are working in metal in art class with T. Diane to make Mexican tin suns inspired by Aztec Sun Calendars.  They are doing this in preparation for our annual Dia de los Muertos celebration on October 31.  (That’s “Day of the Dead” in Spanish.)  Besides being part of a multi-sensory integration of our Spanish, Social Studies and Art curricula, and I’ll bet T. Joseph will work in Math as well before we get to the actual celebration, why might this be important to your child’s future?

According to Dr. Gary Christenson, President of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, medical students with visual arts training demonstrated improved observational skills.  In a 2001 study, medical students who participated in forms of visual arts training, such as life drawing and art observation exercises, showed stronger visual diagnostic skills than those with no arts training.  In short, they had sharper powers of observation and were more likely to pick up visual cues that helped them diagnose a patient.  They looked at things more closely.  Studying art is not just to explore a possible career in the arts, but to become better prepared for many things a child may do in the future.

Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein expanded on this thinking at the annual conference of New Jersey Art Educators earlier this month.  He shared research that sustained arts and crafts participation over a lifetime correlates with being an innovator.  Training in observation and practice visualizing things teach skills that chemists and geneticists, amongst others, can call on when performing scientific research.   A lifetime skill of seeing what is important and detecting changes and patterns converts to many future fields.  Art education contributes in preparing a student to be better at just about anything.  Addressing particularly careers in science, technology, engineering an mathematics or “STEM” Dr. Bernstein went so far as to report that adding “Art” to STEM gives it STEAM!

I hope many of you can join us on the 31^st for Dia de los Muertos.  In the meantime, keep an eye out for a display of Aztec style tin suns!  Between now and then we’ll see what other visual creations will emerge for the celebration.

Baseball is Fun, So is Math! GO Phillies!!

This week some of our fourth graders have had a particularly fun homework assignment.  Follow the Phillies!  The students in T. Patti’s class are playing fantasy baseball during the post-season to learn statistics, decimals and long division.   If you have not heard it from your student yet, math is fun!  This is an important step in helping students not fall into a struggle with math anxiety.

Connecting mathematics to real-world experiences promotes learning and retention of new concepts.  Middle School parents also got a chance to hear about this from Teacher Joseph at Back to School night last week.  Brain research has revealed that students learn better when their lessons address four things:  Why, What, How, and What-if?  In math, “Why” is the connection of a concept to a student’s past experience, such as mixing concentrated fruit juice, which involves fractions.  “What” is the nuts and bolts of how do to the problem.  “How” is the practice and experience of working the problem and “What-if” is directly applying new learning to something concrete in the “real world.”

When most of us were growing up we learned the “What” and “How” of mathematics.   Many of us did not benefit from learning as much about the “Why” and “What-if.”  Statistics, fractions and long division are essential elements to master baseball statistics, and statistics are a useful way to determine how a player may perform.  This connection adds the why and what-if.  Besides, it’s fun, and bringing students back to math class year after year is the foundation of advanced learning.

So, GO PHILLIES! And GO STUDENTS!

Front Row Center

T. Julie-Ann and students at Carmen

Friends School Middle School students were literally front-row center at the opera in Philadelphia on Wednesday afternoon.  Thanks to the wonderful connection by our MS Chorus teacher and Fine & Performing Arts Program Director Julie-Ann Green, who performed as part of the chorus, we were at the front of the house of some 2,000-school students to see the final dress rehearsal for Carmen.   Our students were fully engaged and by the time the curtain call arrived cheered loudly with the rest of the crowd, reflecting clear appreciation for the spectacular presentation they had just seen, and the talent and effort exerted by the cast and orchestra to tell the story of Carmen so movingly.

This trip was another expression of our hands-on learning philosophy, and one that particularly highlights the importance we see in music education.  Every student at Friends School takes applied music instruction as part of his or her program.  It may be Music Together, violin, recorder or chorus.  All students get opportunities to prepare for and then perform in public.  In Middle School this also includes a high level of student participation in the spring musical.  This is all supplemented with the Fine & Performing Art Program that offers music lessons to many of our students and to others in the community.

Google "music and brain development" if you’d like to explore the benefits of music instruction on brain development for young people.  Researchers posit that it has a beneficial impact on memory, visual-spatial development, and possibly verbal and mathematical strengths.  There is far more to be learned.  We do know without performing brain scans that students learn discipline and teamwork, as well as appreciation for a new way they can express themselves and how others may communicate to them feelings ranging from profound grief to ecstasy.   Yesterday’s trip to hear and see Carmen was certainly a powerful lesson, very likely to be retained, that reinforced these concepts.  And it was FUN! 

Helping Children Succeed in School, Life

September brings not only the school bus, but also some interesting articles on education and parenting.  One article that appeared in the New York Times on Labor Day made good reading and shared some good counsel, even though I don’t think the title, “School Curriculum Falls Short on Bigger Lessons,” applies to Friends School.  Citing Kenneth Ginsburg and Susan Fitzgerald’s new book Letting Go with Love and Confidence: Raising Responsible, Resilient, Self-Sufficient Teens in the 21^st Century it addresses many questions including the question of how to best praise a child’s academic achievement.   

It turns out that in one study children who were praised for their intelligence when completing mathematical puzzles began to underperform children in the same group who were praised for their effort.  The children praised for their intelligence did worse on subsequent tests and started to avoid answering difficult questions, fearful that they could not live up to their perceived potential and might fail, whereas children praised for their effort persisted and tackled even more challenging problems.   Dr. Ginsberg reported “When we focus on performance, when we say ‘make sure you get A’s,’ we have kids who are terrified of B’s.”  Instead he counsels, “Kids who are praised for effort, those kids learn that intelligence is something that can be built.”  I’m not a researcher, but I have tried this technique in my own parenting and found it to be useful and believe it had a positive effect.   (My son and daughter are 22 and 24 now, still growing and establishing themselves as young adults, and I’m delighted that they still seem to value my counsel!)

Dr. Ginsburg suggests that choosing the right words does not have to be hard.  Instead of saying “I’m proud you got an A on the test” try “I’m so proud of you for studying so hard.”  The same lessons spill over into the rest of life, including sports.   He also suggests using open-ended questions like “Tell me about the game.  Did you have fun?” instead of simply “How many points did you score?”

The article and the book address a range of topics, all addressing how to foster a child’s focus, self-control and critical thinking.   For example asking responsive questions and encouraging a child to find ways to research or test their own hypothesis rather than simply answering their question can promote critical thinking.  Engaging in collaborative research with your child may be a way to model curiosity and lifelong learning.

If these topics interest you then click on the link to the article above and look it over.  I’d be glad to discuss it with you when we next meet, or you can post your own reflections below.

Happy New Year

We are launched!  A new school year is underway.  I want to welcome each family, new and returning, to the 2011-12 school year at Friends School.  It has been very exciting to greet so many old friends, and to make some new ones. As we reported in the Summer Bulletin and Notes to Parents, a lot of work and preparation has gone on over the summer and we are poised for a wonderful year.

Before the school year officially started, we held our annual “Ice Cream Social” for Prekindergarten, Kindergarten and First Grade students. That evening a returning 4^th Grader excitedly pulled me over to the flower garden behind the Noel-Baker building to show me the Monarch Caterpillars he’d found.  I asked how he knew they were Monarchs and he said because they had yellow, black and white stripes around their bodies, and because they were on Milkweed plants, and Monarchs love to feed on Milkweed.  He was right of course, and together we spied five caterpillars.  He then explained to me how they would soon be making their chrysalis, after which they would emerge as butterflies and then start their journey south to Mexico!  Here was a student filled with excitement about a wonderful mystery of nature he has learned about at Friends School.  He was equally excited to be returning to school, and ready to learn even more new things about Monarchs and other subjects.

This is what we strive for at Friends School.  To provide students with numerous hands-on learning experiences that lead to their unquenchable excitement about discovery and knowledge.  When this process goes on year-after-year, with an ever-increasing level of challenge, we graduate 8^th graders who love to discover and learn, and who in the process have also learned a lot about themselves.  They are then ready for the increasingly independent challenges they will face in high school and beyond.  A wonderful year of exploration lies ahead.  I can’t wait to see what mysteries our students will uncover and discover as the year unfolds.