Hello Lawrence Families!

It was such a joy to greet your children as they walked through the front doors and into the school on September 6th. As they marched bravely into a new school year, with new teachers, new peers, and new routines, our hearts went out to them for we too have experienced the same anticipation around starting the school year. We feel so grateful to be here at Lawrence, where staff and families have been so welcoming to the three of us.

It’s been a wonderful beginning to the school year. Over the course of the first couple of weeks, we’ve seen your students participate in creating their classroom communities. They’ve written their names and drawn self-portraits, created bar graphs of their birthdays, and developed systems for organizing their work in each subject. We have particularly enjoyed sitting in on opening and closing meetings, where students greet each other and review the days plans, then reflect on the day at the end. During an all-fourth-grade assembly, one student gave another a shout-out for “being kind to everyone.” Another mentioned that one of their peers accepted the rules for a game without complaining even a bit. These are just snippets of the type of community building that we’ve seen across the school.

At the same time, academic work is well underway. In science, we’ve seen students create to-scale models of the solar system and draw detailed scientific diagrams. A middle school French class filled in the words of a popular French song while elementary school students singing in Spanish can be heard throughout the school building. Students have reinvigorated their reading lives by choosing just right books and recommending books to their classmates. In math, we observed students sharing multiple strategies for finding the area of a parallelogram. Finally, classrooms discussed the news of the week, including the science and possible effects of Hurricane Florence. We can already see that students will be engaged in both academic learning and the wider world around them through their experiences at Lawrence this year.

Thank you again for your support at the beginning of this school year, and we look forward to sharing more happenings at our school as the year goes along.

Sincerely,

Monica, Maisha and Peter