Friends School of Minnesota 7th and 8th graders wrapped up our Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Media and Pop Culture unit in humanities in May. This unit challenges students to examine the role media plays in their lives, how the media constructs messages about race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and how those messages impact one’s sense of identity. We center the unit around the Center for Media Literacy’s five core concepts.. Read More
Fostering a Caring Community: The Annual MLK Day Celebration
Last Friday evening, I stood in the soaring lobby of the O’Shaughnessy auditorium greeting families, friends, and community members to the Friends School of Minnesota’s annual, all-school Martin Luther King Celebration. The excitement and pride amidst the families was clear; one parent told me it was her favorite day of the year, “even better than Christmas!” she declared.
Story Workshop in Kindergarten
One of the great things about working in a progressive education school like Friends School of Minnesota, is that learning and teaching remain fresh, vibrant, and full. Our school supports teachers and learners to take risks and expand their creative vision, and knowledge base. In this spirit of trying out new and exciting ideas, I introduced kindergarten students to a new structure for learning called Story Workshop. FSM K-4 teachers have been.. Read More
7th and 8th Grade Spoken Word Unit
For the past two months, Friends School of Minnesota 7th and 8th graders have been studying the art of Spoken Word Poetry in their Humanities classes. The unit evolved into a journey for our students that challenged them to express their own truth through poetry meant to be performed. The unit helped students achieve both writing and public speaking benchmarks.
Winter Poems by the Jungle Class
by Brenna Winkelman In a recent poetry unit, 1st and 2nd grade Jungle class student’s discovered how to see the world through poet’s eyes. Students accomplished this in their poem about an object by turning their factual observations into original, fresh, new, and unique ways. Within these poems students realized how their own personal views of an object engage their peers, because they had never seen the object in the.. Read More
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Celebration 2012
Each year, Friends School of Minnesota creates a performance around its Quaker values and the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This year’s performance was on January 13, 2012 at O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. The celebration focused on the Quaker values of justice and integrity and how Dr. King’s work embodied those values.
Bayou Poetry Café a Big Hit!
Every year, Friends School of Minnesota third and fourth graders host an evening Poetry Café for friends and family. Students present the Writers Workshop poems they spent the fall writing and serve treats to raise money for charity. This year’s Bayou classroom Poetry Café was a big hit!
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is so well known that we might not even give it much thought. But this poem comes to mind as I sit here in Minnesota on an oddly brown December day yearning for snow, considering the passing of the longest night of the year, and anticipating festive gatherings of family and friends. Frost’s quiet pause on a snowy night reminds me.. Read More