Program News
Celebrating our Drama Program
Many thanks to Rhonda Hamall for a second great year of drama. Under Rhonda's direction, we enjoyed three dramatic productions this year:
Kindergartners: The Lorax
Lower Elementary Students: The Life of Maria Montessori
Upper El/Middle School Students: Cinderella
The most recent production of Cinderella was a joyful expression of the students' talents and enthusiasm. Many thanks to those who assisted Rhonda to make this production possible: Shannon Lotterer, Barb Blasch, and other parents who assisted in many roles.
Special thanks to Ken Hamall and the Hamall children - Alec, Elena, and Cara - for their work constructing our very own portable stage the weekend before the production.
Celebrating Young Authors
By LinMarie Cameron, Upper Elementary Teacher
Come see the books our upper elementary students have written this spring for our Young Authors project, now on display in the upstairs hallway. They've spent the past two months working through the writing process, beginning with what for many was the hardest part: creating characters with individual strengths and weaknesses, designing problem situations that were reasonable for that character, and figuring out a convincing way for the problem to be solved.
Once the outline of the story was planned, the students wrote the first rough draft and asked a parent to type it. This made it much easier to work on revisions in class. Some tend to write all in dialogue for the first draft, so much had to be changed to narration, while other students had the opposite challenge of adding dialogue. Some needed to add a lot more description, while others had to resolve contradictions that had come out as the story unfolded.
After the revisions, the hard part was over. We sailed through the final steps in the last two weeks: designing the layout, printing the final copy, sewing the pages together, drawing the illustrations, and binding the cover. Each book includes a "teaser" inside the front cover and a column about the author inside the back cover.
Reflections from the Middle School Civil Rights Trip
By Mary Hamiter, Middle School Teacher
I Have a Dream
...This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.
So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!
But not only that;
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
Martin Luther King
As part of the preparation for the Civil Rights trip this year, the middle school students studied Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. They completed a worksheet with history, literary, and vocabulary questions designed to aid their understanding of and appreciation for the speech that has been acclaimed as the best of the past century. They also had to generate three open-ended questions of their own to facilitate the seminar that was held during Logic class the Friday before we left on the trip. As the seminar began, thanks to YouTube, the students watched Doctor King deliver his speech to the crowd at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial nearly fifty years ago.
On Monday, April 15th, GSCM Middle School students embarked on their journey to the major sites of the Civil Rights movement in this country. Walking the streets of Birmingham, they met a woman who, at thirteen, skipped school and marched with her classmates to Kelly Ingram Park where she and her friends were hosed down and chased by dogs. Next, we visited the 16th Street Baptist Church, the site of a bombing that killed four teenage girls attending Sunday School on September 15, 1963. While there, we learned that Martin Luther King's youngest daughter, Bernice King, was going to speak at the Birmingham Jail where her father had been imprisoned and from where, on that very day fifty years ago, he had written his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail. We seized this unexpected opportunity to go and listen to Dr. Bernice King speak. The highlight of that day was actually meeting and having our picture taken with Bernice King. Many students were never again going to wash the hand that shook hers!
In Montgomery we visited the museum built on the spot where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus and was arrested. We also visited Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where Martin Luther King was pastor. Through his office window, we could see, as he did, the Alabama State House just one block away.
On the last day of the trip, the morning was spent in Atlanta at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site where Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, are entombed. We also had the good fortune to enter Ebenezer Baptist Church. Sitting in the pews admiring the beautiful sanctuary and stained glass windows, we listened to the last speech King gave there. Ironically, this speech was used as his own eulogy when his funeral was held there only nine days later.
Site of the largest bas relief sculpture in the world, we also visited Stone Mountain, Georgia, located just east of Atlanta. Larger than Mount Rushmore, the sculpture at Stone Mountain was begun by Gutzon Borglum who left the project when he was called upon to carve Mount Rushmore. The subject of Stone Mountain's sculpture is Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson, the three major leaders of the Confederacy.
Why Stone Mountain? What has this to do with the Civil Rights Movement? Doesn't the sculpture represent the antithesis of the Civil Rights Movement?
How does one reconcile taking the time to view the sculpture, given its subject matter, with the Civil Rights movement? The Stone Mountain experience was an extension of the study of Martin Luther King's most famous speech in which he explicitly calls upon that particular mountain as a site from which Freedom should ring in this country. It can be said that the sculpture represents where we have been as a country when man's unconscionable inhumanity to man was the law of the land. Martin Luther King's call for freedom to ring from the mountaintops of this country, which included mountains in both the historically Free North and the Deep South, asks us to consider where we are now and where we want to be as a nation. It is hoped that the physical experience of summiting the mountain put the students in touch with Doctor King's dream in a way not possible in a classroom that was both intellectual and spiritual. It is hoped that their very souls were stirred to let freedom ring out not only from Stone Mountain, Georgia but ring out in the village, hamlet, city and times in which they live. It is hoped that, as they gazed out upon the city of Atlanta in the distance, they embraced the message of Dr. King:
... And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
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