Younger Class

About Our Class

The Younger Class at The New School is a mixed group of kindergarten, first- and second-graders who play, work and learn together. They are always an enthusiastic and lively bunch, filled with the very natural curiosity that the school seeks to encourage. Younger Classers are eager to explore, experience and control their world, and The New School environment allows them to spend their days learning to do so in productive and satisfying ways. For this age group, it is most obvious that their play IS their work and their work IS their play; the children, themselves, often use those terms interchangeably.

The teacher offers support and encouragement for individual learning processes and guides the students’ endeavors to incorporate all manner of academics into a program that reflects the children’s own interests and abilities. This keeps enthusiasm, self-esteem and learning at exceptionally high levels. And it makes the class a very happy place to be as well!

Younger Classers are also learning – with support from adults, from older children and from each other – how to be a part of “The New School Way,” how to cooperate, how their classroom and the school operate, what their own roles are and what will be expected from them. Play times provide a stream of opportunities for learning and reinforcing social skills and negotiating, while honoring each individual’s experience. The quantity of time devoted to positive and complete conflict resolution often surprises visitors, but so does the maturity and self-reliance that our students typically demonstrate by the time they are ready to join the Middle Class!

Additionally, interaction with the other classes at the school offers another level of richness to life in the Younger Class. Whole-school projects, games and trips, as well as daily interaction with older children, give Younger Class students opportunities to develop friendships and mentor relationships with their “older and wiser” schoolmates.

 

Younger Class Highlights

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Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Puppets [EasyGallery id=’yc:puppets’] Susan read to the class a little each day at lunch from the “Shakespeare can be fun” series. We started with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and each day recapped the part of the story we had read the day before. In this way the class became familiar with the characters and were able to understand the fun but complex plot of the story. The Class then made their puppets using toilet roll middles and a wide variety of fabric decorated with lots of beads, sequins and feathers.		Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream — Puppet Show [EasyGallery id=’yc:puppetshow’] The puppet theatre was made from a cardboard box and painted and scenery for an indoor and outdoor location of the play painted on fabric. However once they started using the theatre for practice they quickly realized they would need to add extra acting spaces on each side – more cardboard boxes, more scenery!
Mushroom Project [EasyGallery id=’yc:mushrooms’] A trip to Holmdel Park sparked an interest in mushrooms. Work included identifying and drawing mushrooms and using a microscope to view them. All of the findings were recorded in the student’s personal journals.		Beach Treasures [EasyGallery id=’yc:beachtreasures’] Beach Treasures – The younger class created a Nature Table in the classroom and displayed and recorded all of the treasures they found on various outings in the school yard and the park. The beautiful weather and a trip to Sandy Hook to look for specimens sparked an interest in the beach.
Thanksgiving Play [EasyGallery id=’yc:2011thanksgivingplay’] The Thanksgiving play has become a tradition in the younger class. This year we started with each child choosing an individual country. We wrote a play about a person from each country coming to share Thanksgiving in New Jersey and the students researched Harvest Festivals in their respective countries. They loved sharing information on their respective countries, writing lines for the play, making their own costumes and making props of their countries food that they were bringing to the feast. It was a wonderful collaborative endeavor we were able to perform at the Middletown Arts Center. An added bonus was real food donated for refreshments and representative of some of the countries.