Welcome to our Curriculum Connections! This is your weekly periscope into classes across campus – we’ll share new learning, challenges, accomplishments, and commentary from students in Lower and Middle School. Enjoy!
Everything Counts in JK
This week’s activities in Junior Kindergarten revolved around celebration and giving thanks! In math, students counted a set of balloon and heart drawings in a message for a classmate’s birthday. They shared and discussed three different strategies for counting a set of objects that are randomly arranged and found that marking as they counted generated the most reliable and accurate total. Students considered what their teachers are most thankful for and generated their own list. Our youngest students are thankful for their families, for books, for going on the swings, for unicorns, and for garbage trucks, among others! Conversations about gratitude created opportunities to share that not all people have access to the water, food, homes, and favorite toys that we do. We were warmed by students’ sharing of what matters to them and their noticing that it’s not fair that some people lack access to these same treasures and basic needs. We read a book about a sea turtle’s adventures donated by a JK student from last year. We reflected on the sea turtle’s life cycle and how it’s similar to and different from the monarchs we have been studying, which also come from eggs and are also endangered animals worth wondering about! We wished everyone a safe and restful break and reflected on ways our families and home plans are both different and, at their heart, the same.
Upper School Candidates Making Amazing Waves in 8th Grade Classrooms
Before the break, eighth graders hosted several Upper School Expanding Faculty candidates, in Math, Science, English, History, Spanish, and Design, as guest teachers in their classes and as interviewees over lunch. These positions will bring the next six key people, from around the country and the Bay Area, to Hillbrook: to build out our ninth grade program over spring & summer, to design ways we will use San José as our classroom, and to lay a curricular arc to 12th grade graduation, both within and across their disciplines. Candidates before break, and in this coming week, bring an incredible wealth of experience and expertise–they have worked in industry and academia as designers, architects, archaeologists, researchers, college lecturers, and engineering fabricators for television sets. They hail from schools near and far, like Menlo School, Phillips Academy Andover, Sacred Heart Preparatory Atheron, Nueva School, Notre Dame, Woodside Priory, Khan Lab School, MIT’s NuVuX, and San José State University. They’ve developed and taught high school courses like, “Religions of Los Angeles,” “Economics, Big Data, and Income Inequality,” “Literature of Witness,” “Advanced Topics in Mathematics,” “IT Careers and Cyberethics,” “Engineering and Ecology,” and many more. They have worked in Jordan, Ukraine, Israel, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, New York City, Cambridge, and beyond. In demo lessons with them, our students: analyzed how area, volume and length scale differently, teamed up for design challenges, reflected on belonging, analyzed poems, used the EPA’s database of water health measures to map our local creeks, made sauerkraut, and more. These visitors are traveling to Hillbrook in hopes of becoming our first cohort of high school educators because they are drawn to the school’s mission, our commitment to authentic, purpose-driven education that centers students, and because they can’t wait to build a program in San José that continues students’ Hillbrook journey to learn about what matters to them and to build the skills to do even more about it!