Grade 6

Students in grades 4 through 9 were treated to the pictures, videos, and stories from the Fall Trips to Nature’s Classroom (Grade 5), Hulbert Outdoor Center (Grade 6), and Europe (Grade 9).

Congrats to all of our travelers and we look forward to the students returning Spring Trips sharing their stories with us in April!

Grade 5
Nature’s Classroom

Grade 6
Hulbert Outdoor Center

Grade 9
Paris

Grade 9
Barcelona

November has arrived, bringing not only a first frost here in Lenox but also yesterday’s fresh, scouring west wind to tear many of the last leaves from their branches, heralding the more serious cold to come. I’ve always admired the renewing power of our seasons, and the way that the bracing challenges of winter often reveal our best, strongest, and most resilient selves.

October began with the Sixth Grade reading ‘Out of the Dust,’ was punctuated by their week away at Hulbert, and then ended with two weeks of exercises, puzzles and games designed to get the students thinking about the complicated relationships between words, their uses, their component parts and their meanings; we explored synonyms, antonyms, homonyms and homophones, as well as touching on the use of metaphor and simile in everyday language. Together, we reviewed a range of poems and the students chose a particularly strong line-up to perform at the upcoming poetry assembly on November 14, at 2:10 p.m. – mark your calendars!

What make up the ‘highlights’ of a term is always subjective: for me, stand-out moments included the enthusiastic and creative contributions students made in our informal debates (listening to Harrison, Stella and others generate, from scratch, and then collectively explore a variety of utilitarian vs. humanist issues raised by industrialization? Pure joy); seeing the clever solutions they came up with in response to writing challenges (Beck’s answer on how to write an advertisement with no nouns? “Buy it!”); and watching as some of the more reticent members of the class started to find their place in the discussion, to exercise their true voices, and to bloom before our eyes.

There is still so much work to do, and the class continues at times to wrestle with basic communication strategies in the classroom. However, no teacher could ask for a brighter, more energetic group, and when they are engaged there is little that escapes them. We will be increasing the difficulty level considerably next term by having longer and more in-depth writing assignments focused on the nuts and bolts of great sentence and essay construction, more ambitious grammar exercises, one substantial written research project, and research-based team debates, along with a unit on the use of historical and cultural materials in the literary essay.

I, for one, am looking forward to it.