The end of the year brings many celebrations: completed work, successful projects, moving on to a new grade in the fall, moving up into a new division. This year, we added one more celebration to middle school: We celebrated decades…
While speaking with a friend on the difficulty of saying goodbye to PDS, she noted something that struck a chord with me: “You know you are lucky to know someone when it is so hard to say goodbye.” As I…
By Mary Ellen Kenny, assistant head of school, lower school dean
These days, the emphasis naturally shifts to bringing closure to the studies that have occupied students and their teachers for many months and to providing time to take stock…
By Geoffrey Dubas, high school math teacher
Being a first year mathematics teacher at PDS, I had no clue I would have the opportunity to be an assistant coach as well and therefore a part of such an amazing accomplishment…
By the end of each school year, the teachers and I can all glimpse the future high schoolers that the eighth graders will soon become. At this point in the year, they have registered for their high school courses, and…
All on the same stretch of Boardman Road,came two debuts this fall: We established a chorus in the middle school and a retirement residence, The Landing, opened up across the street from our campus. With both new endeavors up and…
While grade six works on research papers and presents Lego missions, grade seven is deep in the midst of grappling with proportional thinking in math and literary analysis in English.
Of all the concepts in middle school math, the leap…
By Michelle Holmes, grade 3 teacher
Odd question to ask a third grader during math, right? Not if that third grader is reading Demi’s “One Grain of Rice.” In our exploration of number patterns, several of our students became…
Who doesn’t love a robot? Even with robots in our daily lives, it is still a fantasy to think of what else could be engineered to help us. Our sixth graders work each spring, to imagine robots. They also spend…
By Hannah Sunshine, grade 4 teacher
This spring, 4th graders took a big step in taking ownership over their own learning. When it came time to confer with parents and share work from the year, students took the lead. This…
