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April 2009
News from the Head of School
Spring has sprung at the Taylor School! The children are enjoying being outside without snow pants and mittens, even though some days there is still a chill in the air. The tulips in the PreK garden in the front and the bungalow butterfly garden are beginning to sprout and will be in bloom by next week. The PreK class took their annual “signs of spring” walk last week so we know that we are well on our way.
The invitations to the “Explore and Soar” gala and auction will be in the mail by the end of the week. The committee met at the Heffner Alumni House on the RPI campus today and it really is a beautiful space. Lots of natural light, wood flooring and high ceilings. Please take a trip to our auction website at www.cmarket.com to see some of the wonderful auction items we have accumulated already!
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News from the Academic Director
Dear Families,
One of the tenets of the Taylor School’s educational philosophy states: The learning will be experiential – fostering curiosity and creativity, while instilling a love of learning. This is an important characteristic of the Taylor School – one that sets us apart from other schools. As I go through the classrooms I often see evidence of learning activities where children have stretched their minds and capabilities. It is clear the children have tapped into their curiosity and engaged in meaningful experiences that have expanded their prior knowledge. Through these positive experiences, our students develop a love of learning and a desire to express their understandings in creative, interesting ways.
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News from Pre-School
Our unit on dinosaurs is in full swing. The children are actively engaged in play  themes in the dinosaur cave and at the sensory tables and are enthusiastically approaching all related activities. One day recently, all of the children cooperatively worked on a ‘dinosaur apartment building’ in the block area for half an hour. This was wonderful evidence of the children’s maturing pro-social skills, attention span, problem-solving strategies and motor development. They also cooperatively completed numerous large dinosaurs at the easel and celebrated their ability to work as a team to reach a goal. They really are moving along toward pre-kindergarten! We look forward to having a paleontological bone dig in the sand table as well as a Tyrannosaurus day in the next few days. We will also follow directions to make a ‘volcano’ erupt as the culmination to our prehistoric learning.
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News from Pre-K
March was been a busy yet very exciting month in the Pre-K room. We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day. We had fun making Irish soda bread for a snack! We welcomed spring  with a fun weather unit where we learned a lot about the weather and some great weather words like meteorologist and cumulus cloud! We will continue to study spring and weather specific to this season. Our class will also focus on baby animals which are born in the spring. We will plant some flowers of our own and grow a “garden” in our sand table.
April will also be an exciting month. After our Spring Break we will begin a unit on Space. Look out when you come into our room, we just may be blasting off to visit the moon! And when we land, back on Earth, we will explore the ocean floor during our ocean unit.
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News from Kindergarten
March has been a very exciting month for the Kindergarten. We kicked off the month with a fun Dr. Seuss celebration. We snuggled up with our favorite stuffed animals in our special slippers and enjoyed reading many Dr. Seuss books. The highlight of the day was making and eating green eggs and ham. Fun was had by all! We also welcomed the first day of spring and celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with some fun seasonal craft activities. We still await the beautiful spring weather though so remember to keep packing gloves and hats!
We continue to work on measuring in Math. We are focusing now on measuring area using non-standard units. We also have been working on fine tuning our addition and subtraction skills. We have begun to create three part equations. We’ve explored the numbers 7, 8 and 10. We have explored all the ways we can break them into three parts to create some interesting equations.
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News from the 1-2 Class
 The month of March has gone by so fast, but the 1-2 class is excited spring is finally here! We ended our unit on Ancient Egypt in the beginning of March with our sarcophagus project! The students worked hard carefully designing their sarcophaguses. After we painted we stuffed them and put them on display in the classroom. Everyone enjoyed looking at each other’s unique work.
We began our next theme study of solids, liquids, and gases. During the month of March the students have been learning about different states of matter. We have learned how to make predictions and record observations. One of our favorite activities so far is “Don’t Melt So Fast, Ice!” The students made predictions about what will happen to a piece of ice over time. We came up with a class plan for keeping our cup of ice from melting. We were surprised on how long it took the ice to melt!
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News from the 3-4 Class
 We’ve officially entered into our study of ancient Greece. So far, we’ve completed the outreach trunk activities. We’re also created reproductions of coins from each of the city-states. Currently, each child is working on creating a life-size drawing depicting themselves as a god or goddess. First, each child selected a deity that they were interested in learning more about. Then, they each researched their deity in order to compose a riddle. In art, the students will be creating a mask to place over the drawing. This exciting project will be on display in the hall. For our next inquiry lesson we’ll be holding a mock trial based on the Greek tragedy of Antigone.
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News from the 5-6 Class
In March, the 5/6 class concluded their study of ancient China by having a banquet in celebration of the unit, and by completing a DBQ, Document-Based Question. For the DBQ, the students were asked to interpret historical records and express their understanding of the history of ancient China through a well-written essay. In March, the 5/6 students were also busy learning about adolescence and the changing body. In preparation for this year’s Science Fair, the students learned about the scientific method. Each student selected a topic to investigate by beginning with a question they had based on their interests and wonders. Once they established a topic, they made an educated guess, or hypothesis, based on the research they did on their topic. Over the course of the remainder of the month, the students performed their experiment, recorded observations, gathered data, and formulated a conclusion based on their results. The students are now busy organizing, charting, graphing and typing their projects to display at this year’s Science Fair on April 7th.
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