If you are a fan of vintage American sitcoms, you may have seen the show Hogan’s Heroes which depicts a scrappy group of Allied prisoners in a German POW camp who managed to run countless special operation campaigns under the noses of their jailers. The main character was Colonel Hogan, an effective and clever leader with tremendous morale-boosting skills. His well-oiled machine of dedicated men knew how to cooperate, stay safe, and simultaneously do some good even when the odds were severely stacked against them.
Is it crazy to think that this show has something to teach us as we find ourselves confined in our homes during the COVID-19 pandemic? There is no doubt that, after considering the hardships faced by frontline healthcare professionals, essential workers, and small business owners, parents are the next group under tremendous strain trying to meet the intense demands of their households. This situation has dragged on with no clear end in sight, and the uncertainty is taking its toll on everyone’s emotions and ability to cope.
Clairbourn School students already know a lot about doing good deeds and alleviating distress in the community, and many of them are supporting healthcare workers and first-responders. But there is now a new frontline in the larger battle which is our very own doorsteps. These times call for a deeper level of service to precious family members who we often take for granted. The need of the hour is to make family care and balance a priority. So take a moment to imagine, how quickly the atmosphere in your home would change if you could take a tip from the military and assign a Morale Officer to take care of each person in the family?
If people—specifically children—were similar to computers, then giving them a quality education could be likened to a straightforward system of installing robust processing components, memory, and storage capacity as well as loading them with the right software, information input, and maybe even artificial intelligence necessary to turn them into problem-solving powerhouses.
But, when student are treated like computers to be “loaded,” and are shaped into impressive towers of narrowly-focused achievement, there is an associated risk of their tower crumbling to the ground when life gets difficult. In order to build a student that will withstand the challenges of life, there needs to be an ongoing, sincere investment in the qualities, habits, and connections that build true resilience and that will carry them through major challenges like the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Even though it would be simpler to function like computers, the truth is, we all have emotions that need to be managed. We all have a need for social connection that can’t be denied. We all need a sense of purpose that extends beyond our current talents. More importantly, we all need to cultivate a connection to a “Source” so we can find good ideas when we have exhausted our own efforts to handle a problem.
Clairbourn teachers, like most educators across the globe, spent late March and early April converting their lessons over to an online format so students could continue to make progress in their studies during the COVID-19 crisis. The Internet has so many tools and resources to help with the transition, but Clairbourn is a close-knit community, and nothing can replace the human connection. With teachers missing seeing their students in person, they worked together to make a printable poster message to say hello and give their students added encouragement.
Clairbourn Teachers and Staff Made this Poster to Greet and Support Clairbourn Students.
Clairbourn School Provides Private School Education for Preschool, Kindergarten, Elementary School, and Middle School Grades | Serving Families in the Pasadena, California, Area and Surrounding Cities (K-12 Private Schools) Clairbourn is a 501(c)3 charitable organization. Click here to request information.
Outer space, with its jewel-like planets, shimmering stars, and astronauts with their cool technology, is very exciting to the imagination! Naturally, Clairbourn School preschoolers dove right in to their STEM unit about space with great enthusiasm. The whole class got busy learning about the Milky Way, our solar system, and the planets—and some students even learned the planet names in order!
This was an immersive unit with academic, artistic, and hands-on components. One of the features included a visit from Outreach Coordinator and Astronomer Dr. Jeff Rich from Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, who came to Clairbourn with an inflatable planetarium that fit the entire class inside. A film projector animated the inside of the dark dome with popular wonders of the night sky, and the students were educated about how to locate and identify well-known stars and planets.
Clairbourn students, with Dr. Rich from Carnegie Observatories, entered the inflatable planetarium where projections of planets and stars were projected onto the ceiling of the dome.
In the classroom, students learned solar system terminology—made more engaging by letting the students choose their own word to learn each morning. They also had homework assignments to build a miniature rocket ship and present it to the class by sharing what materials they used, who helped them, and if it was hard to make. They had to share a fun fact about each planet, research who was the first man on The Moon and find out how astronauts sleep, eat, and shower in the space ship.
Left – a student practices writing the space words learned in class each morning. Center – two classmates play “astronaut” during activity time. Right – While wearing an astronaut costume, a student makes a painting of the moon’s cratered surface.
It soon became
obvious that all of the students wanted to identify as astronauts, so not only
did they make art pieces where their faces were combined with astronaut
pictures, but they were able to wear full astronaut costumes with helmets in
the classroom’s Space Activity Center. One inspired preschool parent, Yue Ma,
enhanced the activity center by building a kid-sized, 3D, cardboard rocket ship
playhouse and also a wooden-cutout rocket ship with scenic background that all
the children could use.
Left – The rocket ship wooden cutout, painted by parent Yue Ma, helped students bring their space dreams to life. Right – Moms play astronaut with their children during Mothers Visiting Day. (On the back wall, student-made rocketships provide additional decoration to the classroom’s Space Activity Center.
When the rocket ships props showed up, Preschool Teacher Sayra Rubio became inspired to make a movie with the students playing astronauts in space talking about the planets. Using the school’s video room and Communications Department staff, the filming and editing took place over a two-week time span.
Preschool students were filmed “floating in space” in the school’s green-screen video room. (Note the 3D cardboard spaceship playhouse on set, built by parent Yue Ma, which was used in the filming.)
The parent-made spaceships and the classroom astronaut costumes were all used in the movie, and each student had time on camera either walking on the moon or pretending to float in space in front of a green screen. Afterwards, the students’ own narration of space facts was recorded and combined with the footage. The final movie was shown to students and parents on Mothers and Grandparents Visiting Day, and all the moms were given a copy of the movie for their family memories.
Clairbourn Preschool students have been studying the planets. They learned planet names and facts, dressed up like astronauts, played in a classroom spaceship made of cardboard, and filmed green-screen video segments to help create this presentation.
Watch Clairbourn preschoolers what they know about outer space, the planets, and black holes in their very own movie production!
Additional
memorable moments from the Space STEM Unit included a student asking their
parents take them to a museum so they could see a real rocket ship! Two other students decided to create their
own solar system using clay and Play Doh to interest their fellow
classmates. And, one additional student
took the initiative to make a self-narrated slide presentation about black
holes just so she could share her excitement about the subject with the
class.
This kind of enthusiastic subject exploration is the result of the teacher and child-initiated programming opportunities offered by Clairbourn’s preschool program, with the end goal to create pre-academic readiness and a life-long love of learning in each student.
Clairbourn School Provides Private School Education for Preschool, Kindergarten, Elementary School, and Middle School Grades | Serving Families in the Pasadena, California, Area and Surrounding Cities (K-12 Private Schools) Clairbourn is a 501(c)3 charitable organization. Click here to request information.
Now that Clairbourn School students are spending all of their time at home due to COVID-19 sheltering in place, many of our parents are feeling like full-time maids on top of their overwhelming normal responsibilities. Lack of help from family members in tidying-up can lead to a breakdown in morale among family members when some don’t do their fair share. But the good news is, learning to help is part of each student’s character education and it is part of building up their inner sense of purpose and value.
Dr. Robert Myers from the Child Development Institute published an insightful article last year called, “The Reason Children Should Do Chores is Because it’s Good for Them.” He wants parents to know that, “Giving children chores can make them feel wanted, teach important life skills, and help ease the workload for parents. Recent studies have found that giving children chores from an early age will help teach them work ethic, responsibility, self-reliance, and other vital life skills.”
Author Stephanie Simpson McLellan agrees in her article, “6 Ways to Get Kids to Help Out at Home,” and explains, “It just makes sense: If your kids contribute to the mess around the house, they should help tidy it up. Not so much for your sake, but for theirs. ‘One of the biggest problems children experience is that they don’t feel needed,’ says Maggie Reigh author of 9 Ways to Bring Out the Best in You & Your Child. To help kids mature into emotionally healthy adults, ‘they need to feel that their contribution matters,” she says. “Chores are a really tangible way to do that.’”
Don’t tie chores to earning an allowance because the reward should be praise for doing the right thing and contributing to the household.
Everyone knows, however, that asking kids to do chores can result in an endless pushback and nagging cycle that creates misery for everyone. The good news is, there is a way around this major pitfall. Start Slowly!
Janet Lehman’s article, “How to Get Kids to Do Chores Without an Argument” from the website EmpoweringParents.com advises, “Focus on one chore at a time: In order to change behaviors, don’t try to take on too many things at once. It will just overload both you and your child. Pick the most bothersome problem—let’s say it’s putting their dirty clothes in the hamper—and start there. This focus will help both you and your child set realistic expectations, follow-through, and ultimately succeed.”
She continues, “With younger kids, kids with ADHD or those who lack organizational skills, you may need to help them figure out how to approach a task. Some of their resistance to your nagging may have to do with their inability to know where and how to begin. Their room may be so messy and full of stuff that they really don’t know where to begin and simply give up. You can say, “Okay, let’s start with your dirty clothes, then your bed, then the floor…” and take it from there.”
Each family has a wonderful opportunity, while sheltering in place, to help students build the skills of domestic contribution and maintenance. They will be adding to their sense of family contribution and purpose and learn new skills in the process! Our rally cry can be, “Not One Sock Left Behind!”
Clairbourn School Provides Private School Education for Preschool, Kindergarten, Elementary School, and Middle School Grades | Serving Families in the Pasadena, California, Area and Surrounding Cities (K-12 Private Schools) Clairbourn is a 501(c)3 charitable organization. Click here to request information.
New Clairbourn Trustee Debbie Chen with Chris Chen.
Current Clairbourn parent Debbie Chen has been an important presence on campus for all of the years her son and daughter, Matthew and Natalie, have attended. This is her 13th year as a Clairbourn parent. Natalie is currently in Grade 11 at Westridge and Matthew is in Grade 8 at Clairbourn. And now, Debbie has stepped into a whole different role as the school’s newest Trustee. In order to properly introduce her to the school community, we asked her to share the following information about her life, family, and qualifications:
Cranes—the heavy-lifting kind—are all around us, and they perform vital roles in a variety of industries. They can lift or lower tremendous amounts of weight, move loads into position, and enable construction companies to ascend their buildings into the skies. An opportunity to explore the mechanical principles of these fascinating machines was presented to Clairbourn students during their annual Engineering Week Design Challenge in January of 2020.
Clairbourn Middle School Math Teacher Rebecca Messler
Clairbourn School’s Middle School Math Teacher, Rebecca Messler, returned from winter break excited to share with her fellow teachers powerful ideas gleaned from the California Mathematics Council South Conference which she attended in mid-November of 2019.
This conference, offering hundreds of sessions and packed with several thousand math teachers, proved to be a power-house of great information! Messler attended eight sessions applicable to teaching middle school math. Highlights included presentations from two important thought-leaders in math education, Jo Boaler (a Stanford professor, research, and author) as well as Dan Myer (speaker, former teacher, and the chief academic officer of Desmos.com which, is Messler’s favorite math exploration and education support website).
At the Clairbourn staff development meeting in January, Messler chose to share with everyone the idea from the conference of incorporating “Rich Open-Ended Tasks” (ROET) into their teaching methods.She explained this simple concept can be easily implemented and produces stronger engagement and increased understanding of subject matter among students with differentiated learning styles.
When Christmas time comes, Californians often wish for some brisk winter weather to fully celebrate the season. The desire for snow flurries inspired this year’s Holiday Concert at Clairbourn School called, “Let it Snow!”
Grades Junior Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 5, along with Middle School musicians performed in this year’s Holiday Concert at Clairbourn School.
String Ensemble performers
The show opened with skillfully played, instrumental music numbers performed by middle school students in the Clairbourn Band and Clairbourn String Ensemble. The Band played “Hornpipe” from Handel’s “Water Music,” “O Come All Ye Faithful” by John Francis Wade, and even a Korean folksong titled “Ahriang.” Songs played by the Strings Ensemble included, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” by Mendelssohn and the English carol “Greensleeves.” For each song, there were additional solo performance opportunities for advanced students.
Serving the learning differences among students is a hot topic in education today. In order to ensure that Clairbourn School’s teachers continue to deliver the highest standard of student care, a staff development session was held on Monday, January 6, to deepen awareness of student learning differences and to expand teachers’ collection of resources and strategies.
Speaker Tami Millard, an educational specialist at The Center for Connection in Altadena, California, addressed Clairbourn teachers at the staff meeting with a follow-up talk on “Student Support.” She spoke earlier in September on the topic of “Neurodiversity,” which means we are all uniquely wired with our own set of strengths and challenges. As part of her talk, she encouraged teachers to “chase the why” behind classroom behavior (avoiding good or bad evaluation language) and to instead discover what unmet need the student is struggling to communicate.
