September 6, 2007

Welcome back!

Dear Middle School Families,

Greetings! I trust that you are all enjoying your summer and finding time to be with family and friends. The Middle School classrooms took on a new life in July as the summer camp made use of all of our spaces this year. The sound of children in the classrooms and halls was a welcome one as previous Julys were much too quiet. With August here, our spaces are now in the process of being prepared for the fall and it is only a short time before we are back in full swing. So I hope that you make the most of these last few weeks.

One item to add to your to-do list is a review of the Middle School Student and Family Handbook. The handbook contains a number of revisions, which are indicative of the rich professional dialog that took place this past year. The faculty has spent considerable time reviewing the advisory system and have created the following changes:

Since the inception of the advisory program, there has been some confusion between the role of the homeroom teacher (the student’s core teacher) and the role of the advisor. Beginning this year, your child’s homeroom teacher and advisor will be the same person. Advisory groups will meet in grade level groups during morning and afternoon homeroom periods. Each homeroom will have two advisors and each student will be assigned to one of the two advisors (these are the individuals indicated on the included class list). Your child’s advisor will contact you by the second week of school to introduce him/herself . Your child’s advisor will be your primary contact person. Unlike last year, where students reported to their advisory group on Tuesday mornings, students will now report to their homerooms every morning.
In order to preserve the mixed-grade aspect of the advisory program, students and their advisor will meet in a group with the advisor and advisees from another grade level group during our 45-minute Thursday advisory period at 12:00PM. This will create mixed grade groups of fifth and sixth graders and groups of seventh and eighth graders. These meetings will allow students to come together across grades to engage in a variety of projects and to address community issues.
These within and across-grade groupings will allow us to continue provide a developmentally appropriate curriculum for the advisory program that best meets the needs of advisees and advisors.
These changes will necessitate some reorganization of existing advisory groups, which may result in your child having a new advisor and some new members in her/his advisory group.
These changes will also impact the structure of our Family Conferences, which take place at the end of the first and third marking periods. Beginning this fall, students in fifth and sixth grade will have a single Family Conference with their advisor. Families will not sign up with individual teachers for conferences in each subject area. The conference with the advisor will address the student’s work to date in all of her/his classes. As in the past, students will be expected to be active participants in these conferences and the conference will be structured so that the student can share samples of her/his work and address specific areas of strength and challenge. These conferences will run about 30-40 minutes and advisors will contact families to schedule a mutually convenient time during one of the two conference days. This means that fifth and sixth grade families will no longer need to engage in the complicated business of trying to sign-up for and schedule multiple conferences. Students will also be able to better prepare for a single conference.
For students in seventh and eighth grade, conferences will proceed as they have in the past with families signing up for conferences with core teachers and specialists. Core teachers will continue to post sign-up sheets outside of their rooms and specialist teachers will post sign-up sheets on the bulletin board outside of my office. Prior to the spring conferences, we will determine if we will hold advisor-facilitated conferences for the seventh and eighth graders.

These revisions reflect our efforts to make important Middle School policies and practices clearer so that we can better achieve our divisional goals and the school’s mission. I encourage you to review the handbook with your child as this affords an excellent opportunity to talk about hopes and goals for the coming school year. If you have specific questions, please do not hesitate to contact me before the start of the school year. Whether before school starts or during the year, my door is always open and I look forward to hearing from you. The following are a few other important items to keep in mind as you review the handbook:

The official start of the school day for Middle School students is 8:15AM. Morning homeroom will run from 8:15-8:30AM. It is important that students arrive to school on time. Please remember that students who are late to school and who do not have a note from their parent/guardian will be expected to make up this time at the end of the day.
I have posted to the website a document that contains several of the letters of communication that faculty members may send out as email during the course of the year. We recognize that these letters have a formal tone, but we feel that they contain important information that you should know about your child’s progress. In addition, this information allows for better coordination among Middle School faculty members. It is helpful if you read these letters now so that you are familiar with their form. You can access the letters at http://www.lrei.org/weekly/ms/MS_Emails.pdf.
With regard to communication, please make sure to keep of abreast of Middle School and schoolwide events by reading the weekly blog, which you can access at any time at http://blog.lrei.org/msnews. Please note that this is a new address for those of you who have bookmarked the old one. The blog is updated every Thursday afternoon.

As I mentioned in the spring, we welcome the following new teachers to the middle school team this year:

Leila Sinclaire – Eighth grade core teacher
Joanne Magee – Sixth thriough eighth grade drama and play and musical director
David Lee – Fifth and sixth grade Spanish and eighth grade French teacher
Peter Fisher – Seventh and eighth grade PE teacher
Ledell Mulvaney – Fifth grade drama and lower school music teacher

In addition to these new faculty members, the members of the math department will take on new responsibilities as follows:

Ana Chaney – Fifth grade math and sixth and seventh grade math seminar
Margaret Andrews – Sixth and eighth grade math and fifth grade math seminar
Michelle Boehm – Seventh and eighth grade math

Amidst travels, spending time with families and friends, and reflecting on the past year, many returning faculty members spent time this summer focusing on their curricula and on life in school in general:

Middle School art teacher Carin Cohen, Co-Athletic Director Marcus Chang, and Science teachers Sherezada Acosta and Stephen Volkmann all taught classes at the LREI Summer Institute.
Carin was also the recipient of a Summer Sustainability grant. As part of her grant, Carin developed curriculum units that incorporated sustainability themes/approaches into the art making process.
Middle School music teacher Henry Chapin was also a recipient of a Summer Sustainability grant. He worked with Lower School teacher Jamie Atlas and High School teacher Tim Cooper to develop a web-based resource list of sustainability ideas that the LREI community will be able to access and use in the classroom and at home.
Middle School librarian Jennifer Hubert Swan completed her second summer teaching a Young Adult literature survey course in the Queens College graduate library program.
Ana Fox Chaney began a masters program at the Bank Street College of Education in Leadership in Mathematics Education. The program’s focus is on innovative curricular and instructional approaches and new assessment strategies in mathematics.
Visual Arts chair and fifth/sixth grade art teacher, Melissa Rubin, received a fellowship grant to participate in an Art Teacher’s Workshop in southern France during July. The art center, Les Tapies, located in the Ardeche region of France, provided Melissa with an opportunity to meet other art educators from around the globe and engage in discussions and workshops focusing on art education. Melissa was also provided a studio space and had a chance to get a body of artwork done, ranging from drawing and painting to printmaking and dark room photography.
Sixth grade core teacher Frank Portella continued in his role as the principal for GO Project Summer at Grace Church School. GO Project is an academic support program for elementary students in the downtown public schools.
Seventh grade core teacher Matthew Rosen attended the Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury, Vermont. The program offers a rich array of graduate courses in literature, the teaching of writing, creative writing, and theater arts to students from across the United States.
English department chair and eighth grade core teacher Sarah Barlow completed the planning for a service-based “Social Justice Activism Project” for eighth graders that she started last year. The project connects to their year-long theme “Choosing to Participate.”
Eighth grade core teacher Leila Sinclaire participated in the Facing History and Ourselves Summer Institute that was held Teachers College. The Seminar challenges participants to explore a range of inquiry-based approaches to the teaching of history and to reflect on questions about what it means to participate responsibly in a civil society. She also took an “Adolescents and Literature” class that explored social constructions of adolescence through young adult literature.

A most impressive list and reflective of the commitment that LREI faculty have to their own continued professional growth. Rest assured that whether connected to the projects noted above, or through the day-to-day work that the teachers have planned for students, we have many thought provoking and challenging activities planned for the coming school year.

That’s all for now. With the start of school just around the corner, I hope that you make the most of these last days of summer and that you return with interesting experiences and stories to share as we embark on new and exciting adventures in the fall.

See you soon,

Mark Silberberg
Middle School Principal