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Alumni Spotlight: Service at Greenspring

Alumni Spotlight: Service at Greenspring

Greenspring Alumni Lizzie Wiggin and Brooke Baylin recently partnered with our Lower Elementary students to promote a coat drive for ShareBaby, a non-profit supporting women and families in Baltimore. ShareBaby collects and distributes essential child care items like diapers, coats, and clothes, to families in need in the Baltimore area. Brooke and Lizzie initially learned about ShareBaby when they were students here at Greenspring and they were inspired to continue the work as graduates. Thanks to the generosity of our community, they were able to deliver a total of 54 coats to ShareBaby! Lizzie shared:

“We are so thankful for all the work you have put in to helping us. We hope to work with you again in the future to continue supporting families and kids in Baltimore!”

Winter in the Outdoor Environments

Winter in the Outdoor Environments

Our Outdoor Environments are a special extension of our classrooms and we love to be outside as much as possible. During the winter months, the Outdoor Environments are still a very important part of our classrooms. Read on to learn more about what is happening outside at Greenspring.

Toddler Outdoor Environment

Our Toddler Outdoor Environments are beautifully prepared for the children to explore with materials that promote gross motor activities and care of the environment, such as wheelbarrows, sweeping, pikler triangles, and balance beams. Additionally, works are put out for fine motor skills and concentration, similar to what would be found inside the Toddler classroom.

Children’s House Outdoor Environment

Our Children’s House Outdoor Environments have a variety of winter work based on the ages of the students. Children at this level enjoy incorporating art and creativity into their Outdoor Environment. Recently children made and labeled nature collages and tried to fly nature kites in wind. Younger children practiced mixing watercolor paints on ice. On the colder days when children are not able to go outdoors, they sometimes visit the kitchen for lessons. One group learned about black tea, green tea, and rooibos tea. They learned that rooibos tea comes from South Africa and means “Red Bush”.

Lower Elementary Outdoor Environment

In the fall, each Lower Elementary child planted cold-hardy vegetables including kale, cabbage, cauliflower, and lettuce. The children are excited to see which of the plants have made it through the cold months and they enjoy exploring ways to fortify their gardens from rabbits on campus. 

This winter, small groups of Lower Elementary students toured the campus with Mr. John and had lessons on campus trees, such as the eastern white pine and magnolia, and learned about foliose, fruticose, and crustose lichen. They also had the opportunity to collaborate on baking gluten-free cornbread in the Emerson kitchen.

Ahead, the students are looking forward to lessons on botany, electricity, and morse code!

January and February 2022 Capital Project Update

January and February 2022 Capital Project Update

Initial construction of the Elementary Village began in late January. The construction team has been hard at work on campus and our students are eagerly learning more about the building process. 

First, the perimeter was set up and the trees were cleared from the Grove in order to set the stage for the project. Construction began on the water retention pond and the leveling of the ground for the new building. 

During these initial stages, children in our Redbud Lower Elementary classroom became very interested in the construction process. A group of students began a newspaper thoroughly outlining the entire process. They have interviewed the foreman and other construction workers throughout the process, and they even had an opportunity to review the blueprints!

Footers, plumbing, and electrical have all been run to the building and now we are waiting for the concrete slab to be poured. In the month of March, we will see the progress more clearly. Stay tuned for future updates. 

Adolescent Igniting Voice on Social Justice Topics

Adolescent Igniting Voice on Social Justice Topics

In December, students in the Adolescent Community began their research by asking adults in their lives about social justice topics. They then participated in a speaker series, hearing from Greenspring parents Michelle Siri, Jen Brock-Cancellieri, and Jay Roy as well as Ximena Reyes Torres and Juliana Glassco, on social justice issues including the wage gap, ban the box (employment access for the formerly incarcerated), human trafficking, and national and global initiatives to fight hunger.

After that, the Adolescents selected a topic that is important to them, researched it, and created a presentation about what they’ve learned. Take a moment to watch their final presentations on environmental justice, the opioid crisis, fast food impacts, neurodiversity in schools, the gender pay gap, and police brutality. This work integrates data analysis, research, thesis-building, using supporting evidence, and presentation skills. 

2022 Winter Enrichment Update

2022 Winter Enrichment Update

January was a busy month for our enrichment classes. At the beginning of the month, several of our enrichment classes moved to a virtual model in order to avoid cross-contamination between classes as the COVID rates went up nationwide. We are excited to be returning to our in-person learning in February.

Scroll through this post to see what our students have been up to in our Enrichment classes this winter.

Art Enrichment

Mr. Beven Barnhart

This semester all students in the art enrichment program have begun to work with acrylic paint.

Our Lower Elementary cohort has explored mixing colors, using different brush strokes, and they have started to experiment with what it means to compose a painting of their own.

The Upper Elementary community has been exploring the use of different brush strokes in order to make landscapes with their acrylic compositions, with the caveat of only using the color’s white and blue in an effort to add shades of value to their pieces.

The Adolescent Community has also been composing acrylic landscapes, and while they are using only two colors to do so, they are experimenting with white and an additional color of their choosing.

Physical Education

Mr. Jeff Arenberg

All students begin PE class with age-appropriate yoga and calisthenics-inspired warmups.

The Children’s House students enjoy playing traditional games such as Simon Says, Red Light/Green Light, and Duck Duck Goose, as well as target games with bean bags/balls, soccer, basketball, jump rope, and scooters. We always take time at the end of class for a meditation-inspired cool down.
 
Elementary students are currently taking part in jump rope challenges. They have been playing freeze tag and move the cheese as well. We will be exploring basketball skill-building as our next unit.
 
Adolescents have been participating in activities including jump rope, capture the flag, and a variety of basketball-inspired games. We will be exploring basketball skill-building as our next unit.

Music Enrichment

Ms. Jasmine Mays Robinson

Lower Elementary students have been learning to observe, describe, create, and respond to music using body percussion and classroom instruments, and to use familiar words and concepts as tools for understanding varied rhythms. The students have enjoyed using tonic sofa syllables to learn melodies and using rhythm sticks and shakers to practice reading quarter and eighth notes from the staff. Each class is currently in the process of putting together a wintery piece entitled “January, January” for Glockenspiel, Orff, Percussion, and Sandblock. We are also visiting virtually with Maestro Karl from the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra (a school-wide community favorite) to learn about instrument families.

 
Having previously studied the basics of music notation, dynamics, and instrument families, our 4th and 5th graders are diving deep into the impact music has on our world. How can we use music to tell a story, change hearts and minds, or make a difference? This class has studied the tenets of Rossini and Prokofiev, both historically renowned masters of storytelling through music. Now, they are making connections between these 19th and early 20th century principles and the way music influences our perception of character and the way we interpret action in film. They are then using this information to create their own storylines and their own musical backdrops in order to learn to influence others through music.
 
6th graders, along with the Adolescent Community, are gaining the skills necessary to attain independent musicianship. Our first quarter was focused on learning to play the piano/keyboard and the guitar, read music from the staff and recognize a guitar chord chart. Students enjoyed earning badges for completing levels of their “Piano Bootcamp.” We are now in phase two of our long-term songwriting initiative, which started with utilizing parodies in order to begin writing lyrics using rhythmic patterns and maintaining rhyme schemes. As a closing activity to this portion of our unit, students are given the task of writing out a portion of a song in musical notation on the staff and assigning their own (parodied) lyrics. Our next step is to analyze music in order to understand the parts of a song and understand the purpose and benefit of using literary tools when writing lyrics and deciding on song structure. By the end of this project, students will be able to write their own songs with musical notation.
 
Spanish Enrichment

Sra. Marcela Daley

During the first semester of the year, the younger Children’s House students have been mastering greetings, colors, and numbers. In the following weeks, children will be working with vocabulary to name objects in the house. The older Children’s House students are starting to identify the vowel sounds and reading words with just one vowel on them. Once this work is completed, new key sounds will be presented together with words that have more than one vowel on them. At that point, they will start reading basic sentences in Spanish.
 
In Lower Elementary, students are met where they are in their Spanish proficiency. Some students are working on combining sounds in Spanish and have started to write and read short sentences. Other students have been working hard with numbers. Per their request, we have been working on counting over one hundred and they want to start doing some math in Spanish. There is a third group that has been really engaged in reading and writing short stories in Spanish. 
 
Upper Elementary students are also working at different levels. All students have been engaged in working on their Spanish language through short stories. These stories are all written in the third person and use the seven most used verb conjugation in Spanish (es, está, va, le gusta, tiene, hay, and quiere). A group of students is using the stories to identify basic grammar points like the congruence between article, noun, and adjectives. Other students are starting to put the stories in the first person. These students are also working with the verb “To Be” in Spanish identifying the two equivalent verbs in Spanish (Ser and Estar).
 
Our Adolescents are working on a magazine in Spanish. They have been working on their creative process, conceptualizing the entire publication to include aspects about their classroom, community involvement,  favorite activities, games, advertisement, and comic strips. Their design and editing process has been in both Spanish and English. We look forward to sharing the magazine upon completion – stay tuned!