The end of the school year for Wise School is always a busy and exciting time. Between Maccabi Games, our Heroes Presentation, field trips, and graduation, there’s a lot to keep track of.
Last week, our sixth graders held their annual science fair, presenting projects to the other grade levels and to their parents. Students developed hypotheses using research, wrote and followed detailed procedures to make their experiments fair and controlled, collected relevant quantitative and qualitative data, and analyzed their results.
Our kindergarteners also got in on the science action, as they embarked on a field trip to the Wildlife Learning Center, where they enjoyed a biologist-led lesson on various animals, before meeting the animals housed at the center.
Here’s what’s going on this week:
On Tuesday, our third graders participated in our very own Game Fair, working in small groups to create board games based off of topics they’ve covered this school year in social studies.
On Wednesday morning, our fourth graders departed for their annual field trip to Sacramento. Having learned about our state’s history throughout the year, the trip serves to make history come alive for our students. In their first day alone, they’ve visited Sutter’s Fort, toured the State Capitol, and visited the California State Railroad Museum, where they not only learned about how the railroad shaped our state, but about the printing press and 19th century newspapers.
Back at Wise, Wednesday morning also saw the first of two Library Awards ceremonies. On Wednesday and Thursday, we are awarding Certificates of Reading Achievement and award bags to almost 100 Wise School readers, from kindergarten through sixth grade. To earn these awards, each student must read at least a certain number of books that have won John Newbery Medals, Caldecott Medals, or Sydney Taylor Book Awards.
On Thursday, Wise School students and staff will hold their Decade Day spirit day, where all are encouraged to wear clothes evoking the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Earlier this year, we had a Literary Spirit Day, where students and staff were encouraged to dress as their favorite literary character; and in February, we held an NFL Spirit Day, where students and staff got to wear apparel from their favorite NFL team in anticipation of the Super Bowl.
On Thursday, we will host our annual Pre-K and TK Celebration, and on Friday, we will host our Hagigat Hatorah services throughout the morning (watch live here), and our Second Grade Heroes Museum and Performance in the afternoon.
While our Purim theme this year leaned into the superheroic, our second graders have been studying real-life heroes. The culmination of a year-long focus on the value of leadership, the Heroes Museum project combines research skills, art, music, and more. They find out what it means to leave a lasting impression on the world, and learn what it means to be a changemaker. It celebrates not only public figures—those who have books written about them—but also the heroes in the students’ lives, the ones who teach them, love them, and show them who and how to be in the world.
