It has arrived! The school year is beginning! I hope your kids cannot wait to walk through the doors on Tuesday! We anticipate a joyous reunion and a lovely feeling of welcome for new students, as we launch an incredible year!
Want to get the “scoop” on all things Acera? Our Annual Back to School Night is a must attend event. It is designed to answer the kinds of questions we heard most in parent survey feedback from June! Also, per parent feedback, we are including more parent education in one longer night together.
Time: 6-9pm.
Topics: Math@Acera. Meet the Teachers. Financials Snapshot. Survey Results & Continuous Improvement. Whole School Goals & School Success Dashboard. Engage to hear about Core Classroom themes and approach. Science@Acera.
At Back to School Night, we will share our Whole School Goals for the year; among them are fostering resilience, anti-fragility, and dialogue skills among students, as well as further enhancing our sciences program.
What are plans for our sciences programs this year? What types of science will be explored at Acera? Make sure to attend Back to School Night…. AND Here are a few highlights…
In Elementary:
- Physics specialist Alison will lead hands-on projects aligning with the year-long “Push & Pull” theme, guided by Lisa and Katie which will include Newtons’ laws of motion.
- Health Education within some elementary rooms will include Brain Science, co-led by Sigourney and Neal
- Alexis is an embedded specialist with Anastasia, and will include topics fitting the Oceans, Piracy and Trade theme with science topics like physics of waves, oceanography and marine biology with an overall theme of ecosystems.)
- Adrienne is also embedded with Anastasia’s class, and will include many engineering design topics including a unit on salt.
- In Emily’s class, the theme will be Adapt and Evolve and science topics over the year will include space science, ecosystems and human biology.
In Middle School & Grade 9 Bonus Year: Our science curriculum ensures a well-rounded exploration of topics across upper school years. The successful Classical Physics Program, led by Alexis, will continue. She’s planning courses like:
- Physics: Kinematics, forces, and the foundation for all science.
- You Quantified: Data science, data literacy, and a touch of neuroscience.
- Metaphysics: Philosophy and scientific method, co-taught with Jamie.
- Biology Electives: Genetics, botany, and other potential topics in T2 and T3.
Classes on Astronomy will be added this year with new offerings each trimester, led by Alison (!)
Click HERE for the electives upper schools students have been offered in recent years. Each year, some offerings are updated and re-offered, new ones become included, and some topics are included some years but not others (like astronomy, statistics, economics…)
And… in case you are wondering.. This week marks one of the only ones all year when student programs are not in the building. (We have 10 weeks of summer programs, and we have February and April Vacation Camps!) What are we doing?
We are all here for our Staff Collaboration Week! We are working together on:
- Mission Alignment for serving gifted students
- Math groups planning
- IMP project mentor norms and additional scaffolds being added for incoming grade 6 students
- Collaborative Problem Solving professional development session
- Sharing Student Support Plan (SSP) documentation norms and detailed goals of plans to enable extra support for kids with an SSP across our whole adult community and deepening specific plans for embedded specialists
- Science learning, class options / elective offerings for upper school students
- How we will enact our newly updated phone free school policy (for students) will be enacted
- Timing our start-of-year re-norming for all students re: Team Free Play and more
- Themes and key projects for core classrooms this year across all ages
- Working together on what our school-wide “resilience” theme will look like this year
- Copious small group work such as embedded specialist and core elementary teacher planning times re: how science and other specialists classes will link to whole year themes and meet the needs of that set of students.
- How to engage kids’ resilience and ability to dialogue through expanding their understanding beyond mere dichotomous thinking and into embrace of more complexity and nuance.
- What will be our community guidelines for civility amid an election year?
- AI in education and how these tools might be appropriate and inappropriate for teachers and/or students at Acera
We can’t wait to come together as a community, reconnect, and welcome new faces as we embark on another incredible year at Acera—I look forward to seeing each of you on Tuesday!
~ Courtney
