A few notes excerpted from the Upper School newsletter:
This past summer, two Spanish teachers spent two weeks revising the curriculum for Spanish IV: Culture and Communication. With an emphasis on themes, areas of the Spanish-speaking world, and communicative functions, they developed their own web-based curriculum with the hopes of making the course more interactive, authentic, and lively. They also that that this new approach will allow them to tailor the course to the specific needs and interests of the students at this level. Currently, in both classes, students are working on a video project that examines the role of technology in our lives. As inspiration, students watched videos in Spanish that highlighted how much people rely on technology and how
much our lives are impacted by it.
Two English teachers also met throughout the summer to review and overhaul the Grade 9 grammar unit. They developed new material to be used this year and have decided to expand their unit throughout the winter trimester. The unit starts with parts of speech then progresses to the complex pieces of grammar, with the goal of creating more “effective, concise, powerful prose.” This material was presented to the department last month and is shared with the department on their departmental Haiku site.
The Math Department’s new course, Computer Programming, is off and running! Students in the class recently wrote a lab to calculate how many coffees would need to be purchased in order to make a 10% year-long coffee discount card a worthwhile expense. In addition, students also have created a program that can have a short conversation with the user. In class today, students witnessed the running of a rock, paper, scissors program that a student in AP Computer Science wrote, and the energy and enthusiasm was palpable! To quote one student, a sophomore in the class, “It’s so fun. Favorite class. Love it!”
