one-hundredth day

Dear LREI Families,

Last Friday was the 100th day of the 2019-2020 school year. For many, this was not a huge deal. It was a Friday much like any other, with roughly 70 days left to go. Middle and high school students felt too busy completing their work before the trimester ends in a couple of weeks to think about day 100. To our youngest students though, to the fours, kindergartners, and first graders, the one-hundredth day of school was a BIG deal.

To our youngest LREIers, one hundred of anything is a big deal. The number 100 all by itself, as a concept, truly looms large. For some lower school students, it is unimaginably so, less for others as they are beginning to understand quantity and size and volume. On the hundredth day of school students are challenged by many important ideas. There are activities focused on counting and adding and subtracting, on parts and wholes, and on finding strategies and working together.  It is a rich, thought-provoking day. But this day holds another lesson that is hugely important, that will be long-lasting. Our littlest students spend much of the 100th day thinking BIG thoughts. They grapple with ideas larger than themselves, ideas that seem to them to be insurmountable yet inevitably fall under the might of the children’s work. They strive to appreciate these huge concepts, to make sense of them, to examine them, to mold these ideas into partners in understanding their world. What an experience and one that will be built upon as these students grow.

If a wee four-year-old can learn to think about 100 stories this will help a third-grader begin to imagine the world that came before them – history, now there’s a big idea! That third grader becomes a sixth-grader who creates a robot to compete against other schools before becoming an eighth-grader who ventures out into the world to engage in social justice action.  This eighth-grader is on her way to becoming an 11th grader who plans a trip that will take them across the country to study climate change or gun control or the changing economy, who studies computational modeling, Calculus, Constitutional law, and the great works of literature. Like any skill, tackling big ideas, ideas that seem too large to get your intellectual arms around, starts with thinking big thoughts when you are very small and continuing to meet these challenges over the course of your schooling.  Practice makes perfect, and over the course of their time at LREI our students develop strong and coordinated “big idea muscles.” Well done to the four-year-old who built a building with 100 blocks. Watch out big ideas, here we come!