claire

A vision for the future of Huzzah!

On Saturday,  February 20, 2016, Huzzah, ISW's student-run production company, elected our first President, Rebecca Balcom. We share with you the speech she delivered. It outlines Becca's vision for our new organization and is an outstanding example of everything ISW believes about progressive education.

Fellow students and adults, I’m so glad to be able to share with you today my credentials and my vision for our Huzzah Theater Board. I am Becca Balcom, a junior in high school, and I would like to become president, but will very willingly play any role in this group. I’m a 17 year old who was lucky enough to find my passion for performing at the young age of three, so I’ve been able to gain a lot of experience since then. I have strong leadership skills, honed by my experience in assisting directors, working as a choreographer and teacher, and taking a very active role in my school’s student council. I have gratefully gleaned years of information and received so much from this wonderful community to eternally appreciate. It is time for me to stop looking into my past and turn towards the future, to giving back to a community, and a world, that has given so much to me.

My vision for Huzzah transcends just the group of us sitting here. I desire to begin the laying down of a legacy that will last for years to come, through various forms of outreach. There is the traditional community theater outreach we all know; I’d love to do as many plays and musicals as we can so everyone in our community can participate! In specific projects, I’m particularly interested in honoring our community with such productions as a musical review of Shenandoah, or something that relates to our history and local area.

Once we have these shows together, comes my next level of outreach. Rather than waiting for our audience to come to us, we could come to them! Utilizing our multitude of connections in the area and our skills of communication we could get venues to perform at like a performing theater troupe--whether the venue be a real theater or a school or an old folks’ home! Coming to those who may not be able to come to us will open their eyes to the world of theater and inspire them to become a part of it, perhaps even to become a part of Huzzah itself in the future. As we develop, we could potentially begin to host free or low cost classes in our areas of expertise to give the next generation of performers an extra boost!

My plan of outreach stretches to even another level, one that many of us here today are familiar with--social media. Huzzah Theater Board is one of, if not the only non-college student run theater companies. This makes us special- we are trendsetters, innovators. Through the use of Youtube and a website, we would be able reach out even further than our connections can go to enthrall and inspire even individuals we have never even met! This new form of communication to the world could be used to showcase each of our individual skills and talents--whether videos of original skits, performances of songs, or conversation-starting articles about individual passions. This would be a place that ensures that each and every one of us could shine.

Now I am aware that all of this is a large task to take on. The idea of putting on performances in not just one venue but throughout our area, teaching and inspiring young performers, and tackling the world of social media may seem daunting. But we are the leaders in all of this; we are the very first, and we need to make it count. I certainly do not expect all of this to happen at once or even while I am still a local member of Huzzah. But my desire, as I stated at the beginning of my speech, is to begin a legacy that lasts beyond me and that lasts in each and every one of you, and every one you know. For why should we be called “Huzzah!” if we are not something to be triumphant about? Together, I believe we can build a strong group, and a legacy that lasts a lifetime.  I hope you will choose me wherever you think my ideas could be best put to use. Thank you.

Huzzah's membership includes 15 high school students from schools and homeschools all over the Northern Shenandoah Valley. They are planning three major community productions for the 2016-17 season. Stay tuned!

by claire

"When are we ever going to use this?"

At ISW, we love hands-on math projects because they provide an obvious answer to the question, “When are we ever going to use this?” Recently, Michelle Warner, one of ISW’s Upper Elementary math teachers, brought in ads from a local grocery store and gave her students $100 (fictional) money to spend. The results were fascinating and often hilarious:

• The Future Father: One student spent his money quickly and when Michelle asked him where $36 went, he replied, "I bought two boxes of diapers.  I'm trying to plan ahead for the future when I have kids, because diapers are expensive!"

• The Master Chef-in-the-Making: Another student created a gourmet meal and would only purchase fresh foods, which required him to calculate the cost by weight.

• The Frugal Gals: Two young women combined their funds so that they could shop together.  Their goal was to buy enough food to last an entire week.

• The Entrepreneur: A young man bought just a few basic essential items that were on sale.  When asked what else he was going to purchase since he had so much extra money, he said, "Nothing. I am going to save it and use it to start my own business!"

• The (Self-Declared) Cheapskate: This young man carefully shopped to maximize his spending abilities. He eventually stopped and said he would finish his shopping at a dollar store.

• The True Team Players: Two other students put their money together and shopped as a team.  They spent about $60.00 at the grocery store, noting that they were going to buy deodorant because, "We play sports after school and don't want to stink."  They allocated their remaining money to video games and Harry Potter books.  When they got down to $42.00 one suggested they save it, but the other responded, "Naaah, let's spend it!"

• Old-Fashioned Kids: And then there was the group that spent almost all their money on goldfish snacks and candy…

Great work, Ms. Michelle and your fabulous band of third and fourth graders!

by claire

Opening Day Remarks

9/1/2015

Welcome, welcome! Welcome back to our returning families! And a hearty welcome to our new families. Welcome back, teachers! And a special welcome to our new teacher, Michelle Warner.

While I don’t know what each of you students did with your summer, I can tell you that your teachers and our parent volunteers were busy! We adults spent the summer thinking about you and planning for your return. In this building, you will notice that Ms Laura’s room has a new, open concept layout. The restrooms and the lobby got a much-needed new coat of paint. And Ms Meghan has an office! Over at the YDC, we have a new lighting system in the theater, and we are in the process of renovating the booth in the theater. Ms Katie has moved into the blue room and is ready to tackle Middle School, and Ms Michelle has taken over Room 3 on this campus and can’t wait to get started with her Uppers!

The entire staff has been working on exciting new curriculum—choosing new books and working on field trips. We are especially excited to get started on the community service theme you students selected last spring: Animal Welfare.

Ms LaTasha and I spent much of the summer researching and planning to expand our performing arts program at the Middle and High School levels so that we can better serve both full and part-time students all over the Northern Shenandoah Valley.  Middle and High Schoolers, you will no doubt be pleased to hear that, in addition to ISW’s production of Annie Jr, we also have an Improv Workshop planned for September 12 and an Open Mic Night the same evening.

Our Board has been working hard too. Our Building Fund Committee is looking at pathways to a new, more permanent home for ISW in the next couple of years.

And as we contemplate moving, it seems entirely appropriate for us to consider who we are as a school and as members of this region’s non-profit community…which brings me to our logo. And this is the “educational” part of my talk.  I hope that all of you—students, teachers, parents, board members—are proud to call ISW your school home. And part of school pride requires an understanding of our logo, so here goes!

ISW chose leaves because we wanted our commitment to nature to be obvious. There are three leaves because we have three divisions—elementary, middle and high school. Our three leaves are from two hardwoods and one softer wood—oak, maple, and birch. Hardwoods are often best for building because, like ISW, they are durable, and they don’t dent easily. On the other hand, softer woods are more flexible and easier to shape. It seemed to us, when we designed the logo, that we wanted a little of both—strong core values mixed with flexibility.

On the far right we have the oak leaf. The ancient Celts saw the oak as a cosmic storehouse of wisdom—all the knowledge of the universe. Oak is associated with respect, responsibility, integrity, and commitment. Sound familiar? Interestingly, oaks also tend to attract lightening.

In the middle, we have the maple. The ancient Celts believed that maple trees are empathetic trees which mystically bring together all who gather under its branches.

And finally, on the far left we have the birch. According to ancient Celtic lore, birch is a pioneer tree—one which takes root and frequently revives landscapes where no other tree dares to grow. Birch is the symbol of growth, beginnings, and adaptability.

Truthfully, I am not a big believer in Ancient Celtic myths, but I do think it is inspiring to consider how the ancients thought about ISW’s symbols. As we start the year, I wish for ISW all the blessings of our logo: wisdom from the oak; friendship and love from the maple; and the pioneer spirit from the birch.

Kindergartners, Lowers, Uppers, Middles, and High School Students, thank you for your excitement, your inspiration and your trust. This school is, as always, our gift to one another. Welcome to the new school year.

by claire

ISW, a performing arts resource for all area students

ISW was founded in 2008 as a gift to the Winchester community, and we take that role very seriously. While all our programs, from Kindergarten through High School, are available on a full or part-time basis, today we are highlighting our performing arts programs, which are open to all students in the area. Our goal is to become an incubator for the performing arts in the Northern Shenandoah Valley.

• Last month, we hosted actress and master theater teacher Thomasin Savaiano, who conducted a two-week acting workshop. Young Actors Academy 2015 served more than 25 students--two thirds of the group from other schools.
• Annie, Jr. auditions are next weekend! We are thrilled that we have heard from students from many area middle and high schools who are planning to attend. We already have students assistant directing, running sound and lights, and developing/teaching choreography.
• ISW hosted three Open Mic Nights last school year with attendance reaching more than 50 students, the vast majority from other schools.  We have another Open Mic Night planned for Saturday, September 12. This is an excellent opportunity for budding performing artists to try singing or doing stand-up or playing an instrument or tackling improv in front of a supportive group.
• ISW is hosting an Improv Workshop, led by our own La Tasha Do'zia-Earley, before Open Mic Night on September 12th. Again, it's open to interested students in the community!

Help us get the word out by sharing this post on social media. The more people who hear about the amazing options available at ISW, the better we are able to carry out our vision of serving the students of the Northern Shenandoah Valley!

by claire

Student-led conferences

At ISW, students lead their own end-of-year conferences. We love this practice for many reasons, not the least of which is that it allows us to live out many of our Core Values, including Respect, Responsibility, and Commitment to Education.

Beginning in Kindergarten, our teachers devote classroom time toward the end of the school year to sitting down with each child to take a look—one-on-one--at work completed. Our youngest students fill out teacher-created guide books that highlight their favorite activities (best field trip or Humanities topic or math accomplishment or song) as well as the elements that need more work (reading aloud, or listening, or memorizing math facts). Even our youngest students show surprising insights into their learning process. It is both heartwarming and tremendously encouraging to witness very young people lead their own conferences.

As students get older, they write considerably more in preparation for conferences, and the focus is on serious reflection. (When did I show grit? When should I have worked harder? What should be the focus of my summer work? What are strategies that have worked for me as I have tackled organization issues? What project did I rock? How did I balance the many demands of my schedule?) Students also put together portfolios of their work to share with parents. Adolescence is a period when students often experience the world as adult-dictated and themselves as powerless. The process of taking ownership through student conferences, however, is particularly empowering for Middle School and High School students. It suggests to them, rightly, that the adults in their lives respect them for the young adults they are becoming, that we trust them, and that they are well on the way to taking charge of their academic lives.

Assisting students in preparing for conferences is time-consuming; the fruits of that labor are well worth the effort.

by claire

Finishing Middle School with a Flourish

Each year in early June, we mark the achievement of completing Middle School with a student-selected, themed luncheon that includes student speakers, who regale us with stories about our 8th graders, a student-elected adult speaker, and a slideshow.  We also present the newly-minted high schoolers with "Class of " tees. Congratulations, Class of 2019!

Ms. Claire welcomed the Middle Schoolers, their teachers, and their parents with the following.

Welcome to the Independent School of Winchester’s  second annual luncheon honoring Middle Schoolers completing the 8^th grade. Welcome, teachers—who have worked so hard to prepare our 8^th graders for high school and for life!  Welcome, 6^th and 7^th graders—in whose honor this event will be in just a year or two. Welcome to our rising 6^th graders—who begin Middle School in the Fall—and to our high school students, who wanted to see their dear friends through this important milestone. And welcome especially to Mariana, to Katherine, and to their parents. We are here to honor you!

Our theme today is the book Little Women. Please enjoy the High Tea prepared by the Kornreiches and the Spargers. Many thanks to Lenore and Dee!

Hopefully most of you know that Little Women is a novel written by Louisa May Alcott in the late 1860s. It features the four March sisters and their parents facing a myriad of challenges during the American Civil War. My family had the good fortune to visit the home where Louisa May Alcott lived for many years. Much of Little Women was based on her own life experiences. We laughed when we discovered that her parents had started a progressive school in a barn in their front yard—a little close to home for us!

This 147 year old novel has much to teach us! It speaks to ambition, which abounds in both Mariana and Katherine: “Jo's ambition was to do something very splendid. What it was, she had no idea as yet, but left it for time to tell her, and meanwhile, found her greatest affliction in the fact that she couldn't read, run, and ride as much as she liked.”

Little Women also speaks to the challenge of getting one’s emotions in check—a skill that figures big in the transition from elementary school to high school. Jo March’s “quick temper, sharp tongue, and restless spirit were always getting her into scrapes, and her life was a series of ups and downs, which were both comic and pathetic.” One of the tricks to surviving the Middle School years is to figure out how to weather those ups and downs and how to hold one’s tongue, especially when addressing one’s parents.

Hopefully, now that Ms Diane, Ms Brigitte, Ms Christy, Ms Becky, Mr Jay, Ms LaTasha, and Ms Kerry are almost done with you, you also know that is important to, “Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.” Translation: in the words of Ms Diane, “Get a planner and use it!”

Congratulations, 8^th graders. I will close with Jo March’s thoughts: “I want to do something splendid...something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday.” At ISW, we are quite sure you will both astonish us one day. We are already so proud of you!

And now, in the words of Louisa May Alcott, “Let us be elegant or die.”

by claire

ISW Hires New Faculty!

The Independent School of Winchester is very pleased to announce that we have hired Michelle Warner for the 2015-16 school year. Michelle’s responsibilities will include teaching humanities, math, art, and science. Michelle graduated from Oregon State University with a BA in Art History and a minor in Visual Art, and she earned an MAT in Elementary Education at Lewis and Clark College. She also holds a Virginia teaching certificate. Michelle brings a wealth of experience as an educator to ISW—including stints in Head Start, a charter school, and an English language program in South Korea. For the past three years, Michelle has taught second grade locally. She is thrilled to be making the move to ISW and is particularly excited about working in a progressive school. Michelle and her husband live in Winchester with their two children.

Welcome to ISW, Michelle!

by claire

What ISW and organic food have in common

“The problem with conformity in education is that people aren’t standardized to begin with.” Ken Robinson

As parents, we all try to provide the very best for our children—from health care to spiritual/moral training, from food to education. Fast food chicken nuggets? We all know they are mass-produced as cheaply as possible in a few central locations. They are intended for everyone and for no one in particular. High quality ingredients aren’t used; non-food additives are used to extend shelf-life. It’s pretty clearly not about making good, healthy food. It’s about creating a standardized product that will make money, regardless of the long term consequences for the consumer. While the occasional nugget probably won’t kill anyone, most parents would agree that their children’s diets should lean heavily toward fresh, locally sourced, organic-if-possible ingredients.

When it comes to education, however, not everyone realizes that most American schools have ceded control of both standards and testing to giant, for-profit corporations. The curriculum they generate is intended for everyone and for no one in particular. Like the production of the nugget, the process of developing curriculum and tests is about reducing costs and increasing profits. Multiple-choice tests are not used because they test anything well but because they make automated grading easy and cheap. And they dominate the school year—despite the best efforts of talented and committed teachers everywhere. No wonder so many students can’t wait to be done with their education.

The good news is that, as is true with food, you do have an alternative—right here in Winchester.

A really strong independent school education is more like a meal locally sourced from organic foods. At ISW, we are working to develop a very particular set of skills at each grade level, but the way we help students develop those skills is different every year, depending on the students we have in front of us. We have a group of children who love horses? Let’s read Misty of Chincoteague and go visit Assateague Island. We are studying Italy with our Kindergartners? Let’s go to a local Italian dance studio and perhaps an Italian restaurant, where we are allowed behind-the-scenes. Our high school students are reading about world current events and they ask if they can do a newscast? Why not? Our Algebra I students are working on slope. What if they build birdhouses to see how/why slope matters in the real world? Our teachers are wonderful "education chefs"!

At ISW, our content is co-created with students, teachers, and parents as partners, and the experiential component is locally sourced. On a daily basis, we talk with students about what approaches excite them, what tidbit did they hear in the news last night that relates to what we are studying, what places would they like to visit, what topic fascinates them and might be worth spending a few more days studying. In our monthly parent/teacher teaching team meetings, we talk about what’s coming up in the curriculum, and parents routinely contribute resources (friends, new locations, projects) that tie to the curriculum in the form of field trips and speakers. At ISW, the education process is truly organic, and as you might expect, our students find the process of education both exciting and supremely satisfying.

ISW was founded so that families in our region would have choices. And we work very hard to make the choice of an independent school affordable to a wide range of families. If you are interested in learning more about our organic approach to education, call us at 540-877-5552 or email us at info@iswva.org.

For the record, I attended public schools from first grade through graduate school, and my mother taught in public schools for more than 40 years.  Public education as a concept has my 100% support. Corporate takeovers do not.

Claire McDonald, PhD

Head of School

by claire

Looking for a high school program? Check us out!

ISW opened our high school this year  with a small number of full-time 9th graders and a significant number of students who are with us part-time—performing in our Select Program (which produced Around the World in Five Plays in the Fall, and is currently producing Schoolhouse Rock Live!, Jr), participating on our secondary Destination Imagination Team (which made it to State Finals), exploring Shakespeare after school, and enjoying our Open Mic Nights.  These programs  and successes are made possible by our amazing teachers—all with at least five years teaching experience, many with ten or more. What unifies our students, teachers, and parents is a shared vision—a progressive high school where students get a strong academic foundation, pursue their passions, develop their creativity, and produce a portfolio of real, meaningful work in collaboration with master teachers.

We are very excited to develop and expand the program further next year, with the addition of 10th grade.

If you are considering options for high school, consider HS at ISW. Our program is tailor-made for:

• Our own students, of course!
• Serious students who have attended other middle schools and are ready for challenging and exciting work in a relaxed atmosphere.
• Students who have been homeschooled through Middle School and who are ready for a small, formal school setting.
• Students who would like to attend school part-time and homeschool part-time.
• Talented students who are highly creative and looking for individualized opportunities.
• Students who have already identified a passion or gift (a dancer, a musician, an athlete) that would be better supported in a small, flexible environment.

We would love to talk to you about the options for 2015-16—both full-time and part-time.  If you are a rising 9th or 10th grade student for whom ISW may be a good fit or you are the parent of a potential HS at ISW student, email us at info@iswva.org or call us at 540-877-5552 for a tour.

by claire