The 79th Street Gate: A Lower Division Newsletter

Dear Garden School Community:

We all mark times in our lives: birthdays, anniversaries, what we did five years ago, length of time of various friendships. Often, Facebook posts are quick to remind us of these.

The passage of time can be depicted in many ways. With movies, often changing styles or décor give us glimpses into various time periods. Models of cars can help us to tell time in tv shows. Ripping calendar pages mark the movement of time, as does changing leaves on trees or on-going construction projects from beginning to end.

Children tell time and mark important points in their lives through calendar work, pasting stickers, and counting forward and backward. Parents keep memory books of important childhood times such as birth, first teeth, first words, first piano recitals, first sporting events, and school first performances.

Then and now photos really show the progression of time, and a look at all the graduation photos in our Main Office clearly shows that Garden has a rich tradition and continues to move forward.

Milestones are so important in our lives. People treasure photos, stories, charm bracelets, jewelry, plaques, trophies, and medals—all testaments to important events. Garden is very fortunate to soon be marking 100 years, and our Road to 100 is a great map for moving forward. What a milestone 100 years will be! And today, we mark a very important milestone, 100 days of school this year! Children have celebrated with stories, books, and art projects.

Read through this newsletter, and reminisce about firsts for your child, and for yourself: firsts in science, firsts in the arts, firsts in the snow, firsts in service projects, and first and lasting friendships!

Enjoy,
Bill Vogel

Nursery, Pre-K and K

A timely and popular topic for February and Early Childhood students is Dental Health, especially after our tasty Valentine’s Day goodies! We began by asking “Why do we need teeth?” We did some research using Our Big World (February issue) for information on biting, chewing, speaking, and best of all, smiling! So, we need to care for our teeth. We sang a tooth-brushing song, took virtual trips to the dentist, practiced brushing with a big green dinosaur, and made a cute model of a mouth to help us name the parts: tongue, gums, and teeth. Students have a toothbrushing chart to record twice daily brushing, as it is never too early to take care of our teeth!

Health Education has been a unit of study since beginning school in September for our prekindergarten students. Certain health behaviors have become healthy habits because they are practiced every day. Wearing a mask, washing hands, keeping a safe distance, and hands off your face and mouth are some of these healthy habits that have been formed this year in Pre-K. The students recognize that personal health decisions and behaviors affect health throughout life. Added to this list of healthy habits is taking care of teeth. February is Dental Health Month and the Pre-K students have been practicing ways to take care of their teeth. Eating healthy foods, drinking water and milk, and brushing and flossing teeth are some of the topics explored that help support this unit. On Wednesday, the Pre-K students took a virtual field trip to the dentist’s office through KidVision Pre-K.

The dentist’s office was a familiar place for some, and a new experience for others. Either way this virtual trip was experienced and enjoyed by all. They were introduced to the tools a dentist uses to help keep teeth healthy and exactly how many of these tools are used during a dental visit. The students got to view a dental visit as a positive and fun thing to do that helps to keep us healthy. By the end of this unit the children will be able to identify types of foods that help the body grow, plan a healthy meal and/or snack, and understand proper decision making skills for making health- promoting decisions. I Know Why I Brush My Teeth by Kate Rowan and Brush the Germs Away by Joy Ray are just two of books that we read to help support our unit of study.

The kindergarteners visited the Arctic. Today we learned about the countries within the Arctic circle! Parts of Canada, Greenland, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Alaska are all in the Arctic region, and share some similarities in landscape, weather, and wildlife, but differ more in culture. Students worked in pairs to learn about one country of their choice. Using informational texts, we conducted our research by looking through photographs and searching for key words. With the help of their partners, each student chose two facts about their country to illustrate and write about. To wrap up our lesson, the students presented what they discovered about their countries and were able to teach each other about these global places!

Grades 1-2-3

The first grade science class has been very active throughout their Physical Science unit! As this unit brings many fun and educational hands-on activities for the class, it also allows for new STEAM Challenges! As we finished our physical properties lesson, we took a break from the books to get hands on with the challenge of creating Penny Boats. Each student was given a piece of aluminum foil and tasked to design and build a boat that would hold the most pennies, and our record was set at a whopping 78 pennies! This STEAM Challenge allowed the students to take a stab at Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math through careful planning and strategic trials. Going into the remainder of the marking period, our young scientists will have the opportunity for more STEAM Challenges and more hands-on experiences that will allow them to develop in multiple subject areas.

This week in fifth grade science class we are wrapping up our exciting unit, Ecosystems and Ecosystem Interactions! From learning about the three kinds of symbiosis (parasitism, commensalism, and mutualism) to navigating food webs, we have done it all! We are finishing strong with a final exploration of how and what things cycle through ecosystems with a personal favorite, the nitrogen cycle. We owe A LOT to soil microbes that process nitrogen from the atmosphere for us to make our DNA from. Next time you are outside, thank your local plot of dirt for the fifth grade Garden School class!

The 6th graders have been investigating our solar system the past few weeks. Learning about the planets, the old and new Space Race. They focused on learning and understanding about the 3 spacecraft that entered Mars's influence. The United Arab Emirates put into orbit a weather satellite, the Chinese put into orbit a reconnaissance satellite with a lander/rover that will touch down in May, and the United States landed the Perseverance Rover that will be collecting Martian soil to bring back to Earth on a future mission. The students discussed and learned about each and how hard it is to get to Mars.

As you have likely noticed, our addition of Kat Sullivan this year has had a profound impact on our school’s social media presence as well as our admissions structures. We have moved our process up on the calendar and increased the steps required to file an application for enrollment. We have been thrilled with the response and intend to grow our enrollment throughout the entire school, and the Upper Division is no exception. The work done by Kat and the rest of the admissions team is worthy of applause.

With all this in mind, we want to make you aware we released our last batch of acceptances for grades 9-12 earlier today. The acceptance packet includes a special welcome from the members of the community. We now ask that you show your Garden School Pride this weekend by using the hashtag #ilovegarden.

Post a photo in Garden Swag (sweatshirts, t-shirts, etc.) and tag us on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter
Post a positive review about Garden on the following sites:

Niche
Private School Review
Google (Scroll down to or click "Reviews")

Last, we have had a recent influx of sibling inquiries for the upcoming Academic Year. As spots are filling up quickly, please contact Kat Sullivan asap if you have another child interested in applying to Garden for the 2021-22 Academic year.

The Kindergarten students worked hard to complete two art projects this week, one from our Valentine's Day unit and one for Black History month! Students presented their responses to the four questions they asked themselves when discussing the importance of love and appreciation: What is one thing I love? What do I love reading? What do I love making? What do I love playing? We discussed some of the similar interests or differences we have with some of our peers. We also learned about the artist and author Faith Ringgold, a black woman from New York, who wrote about her experiences living in Harlem as a young black girl. She used her imagination to fly and explore the beautiful world around her. PreK and Kindergarten created different variations of this imagine that she created in her story, Tar Beach. Where would you go if you could fly anywhere in the world?

The short /e/ sound was also studied this week as one of our new vowel sounds! We learned words that begin with short /e/, but discovered most words we use have short /e/ in the middle. Students used their whiteboards to practice building CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words such as pen, bed, and peg.

Students continued their celebration of African American artists with projects inspired by two Abstract artists from the Washington Color School.

The first, second and sixth graders learned about the incredible mosaic-like paintings of Alma Woodsey Thomas. In 1972, Thomas became the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum. Using her works as inspiration, the younger students created colorful construction paper collages and the older group made bright nonobjective tempera paintings.

Meanwhile, the third, fourth and fifth graders learned about the richly painted canvases of Sam Gilliam. Gilliam’s artworks boldly defy the convention of a framed, stretched canvas and hang down like a brightly colored tapestry. Students used a variety of media including marker, saturated watercolors, and tempera paint as well as some unconventional materials to create their twisted, turning abstract artworks.

With the current situation in New York City with COVID and quarantines, the switch to remote learning or teaching can happen at any moment. Being a teacher with this reality, I am happy with how seamless the transition is within the Garden Community. The use of google classroom to communicate with your class or to post assignments has made distance learning more productive on an academic regard. Teachers are using different means to deliver lessons, for example, screen sharing a video in Science class, a song in music, or a multi-step algebraic equation in Math class. The creativity of teaching and learning has been taken to the next level this school year! Overall, whether the student or the teacher is in the class or at home, the lesson is strongly delivered without missing a beat. We may be missing the classroom environment, but we are not missing the classroom content!

Ms. Bruzzese has been at Garden School since 2016, graduated from Drexel University, is pursuing a School Leadership degree at St. John’s University and currently teaches math and science courses in both the upper and lower divisions.