Levey Day School: Endings and Beginnings
One might think that the winding down of the school year would mean
only endings, but the last part of spring at Levey has been full of exciting
new avenues of study and inquiry. Last month I highlighted some of the
exciting happenings in our Judaic curriculum, but our students have
been just as busy with their secular studies.
Our pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students are reveling in all of the
new skills they have mastered this year: both the alphabet and the
aleph-bet, counting by 1’s, 2’s and 10’s, reading a bar graph, writing and
solving simple number sentences, and singing songs. They have also
learned about important Americans such as Helen Keller and Martin
Luther King and performed for residents at the Atrium and Cedars.
Our first and second graders have been studying vernal pools (you
know, the temporary ponds that form in spring that are essential habitats
for lots of critters) and watching tadpoles grow into frogs in a classroom
version of a vernal pool. They have also studied lighthouses, welcoming
a lighthouse expert as a classroom guest, and shipbuilding, which took
them on the road to the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. First and
second graders also chose topics that interested them to research in
books and on the internet, producing bound books that they wrote and
illustrated themselves on topics including the Red Sox, clouds, bearded
dragons, and stars.
Our third, fourth and fifth graders have been studying the human body
and all of its systems in depth, conducting such experiments in class as
a demonstration of how our brains perceive taste and culturing bacteria
found on the human body. We have also taken some time to assess
our students with standardized measures of reading and mathematics
achievement. We are pleased to report that Levey students as a group
perform very well. These results confirm Levey’s conviction that the
challenges inherent in our integrated curriculum enhance learning in all
areas.
We will end another wonderful year at Levey in just a few short days,
celebrating new beginnings for our oldest students. We will bid farewell
to six graduating fifth graders, knowing they are very well prepared for the
challenges ahead in middle school. That may sound like a small
number, but it represents a lot of growth. While Levey has been
configured many ways over the years, it was for a number of years a
school that offered only early primary education through second grade. It
was only in the fall of 2001 that Levey offered third grade for the first time
in recent history, adding fourth grade the following year, and fifth grade
the year after that. In 2004 we graduated a lone fifth grader, our first in
many years, and last spring we graduated a pair of fifth graders. It is
very exciting to see the upper grades already becoming established as
we graduate a half dozen. As they leave, we anticipate about twice as
many kindergarteners entering Levey next year, so we hope and fully
expect to double our graduating class again not too far in the future.
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Levey Day School
A Community Jewish Day School
