NOTES FROM NIGEL

SERVICE LEARNING; VISIT TO CAMBODIA

A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR OF MIDDLE AND UPPER SCHOOL

INTERIM PROJECTS

VARSITY BASKETBALL

MEDIEVAL NIGHT

A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR OF LOWER SCHOOL

SUMMER LEARNING ADVENTURES AND SPORTS ACADEMIES

TPA - CULTURAL ENRICHMENT; ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

TPA - VOLUNTEERS NEEDED

GREEN TIE EVENT

PAINTBALL EVENT - NEW DATE

RAK CAMP FAIR

Who said parenting is easy? It isn’t. Parenting is a huge responsibility requiring an enormous amount of time, energy, patience, diplomacy, persuasion, encouragement, guidance and support. Probably the most unsettling part of parenting is not knowing whether one is doing the right thing, making the right decisions. Let’s face it, it’s not as if we can go to school and attain a degree in parenting and use that knowledge to guide our decisions. Fortunately, parents don’t parent their children in a vacuum. Most parents have the benefit of their own parents, and perhaps siblings and close friends, to help them as well as a school, like Tesseract, to provide additional guidance and support.

While there aren’t degrees in parenting, there are for those who are professionally trained to educate children, which very much includes the nurturing of the growth and development of children. At Tesseract our main focus is doing everything we can to engage and connect with the children—in support of parenting and in support of the social, emotional and intellectual development of the children—this is what we pride ourselves in doing well at Tesseract. Every day we search for ways to engage the curiosity of each and every child. But, like parenting, it is not easy, and even though we have our degrees and we have varying years of experience, we are continuously searching for the most effective ways to educate children. Tesseract’s educational philosophy tells us that by looking at children’s education through their lenses and their perspectives while bringing our knowledge of child development and pedagogy, we will be successful in connecting and reaching even the more reluctant learners.

As you read through these pages, you will see more examples of the thoughtfulness and commitment of our educators and our community that goes into engaging young minds.

Best,

Nigel Taplin, Head of School

Read Nigel's blog at http://schoolof thought.tesseractschool.org

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Engaging children is what Tesseract is all about. One way we do this is through our service-learning program. Service learning enables students to apply skills learned in the classroom in a meaningful way and for the benefit of the common good. At Tesseract, service learning manifests in several ways: through classroom projects, the middle school TAFFY (Tesseract Action Force For You) club, biannual campus-wide service days, upper school service hours and various independent projects throughout the year.

This fall we had a successful Shea Tesseract Community Outreach Day. Middle school students participated in six projects throughout the Valley, while upper school students spent the day at St. Mary’s Food Bank. The middle school projects were: CPR certification, trail maintenance at 40th and Shea, helping with projects at the Herpetological Society, spending time with Head Start children at Golden Gate Community Center, sorting items at Desert Missions Food Bank, and helping with a variety of tasks at UMOM. The spring service day is just around the corner (Friday, March 12). Middle school will be working with Pinnacle Peak Park, Desert Missions, the Herpetological Society, UMOM, Home Base Youth Services and St. Mary’s. Parent volunteers are always needed. Please contact Tina Kanelos (tkanelos@tesseractschool.org ) if you are interested in joining the middle school’s projects.

While TCO days are a big part of our year, the TAFFY club has worked on several other projects this year. In the fall they visited UMOM for a night of reading with the children living at the facility. This spring they spent an evening preparing lunches for the Youth Outreach Program run by Home Base. These lunches went to homeless youth on the streets of Phoenix. In January they coordinated school-wide a vitamin drive for our sister school in Cambodia. Through this drive, we were able to collect a year’s supply of vitamins for 90 children.

The students were so motivated to collect vitamins because they heard wonderful stories and saw amazing pictures from the trip that early childhood educator, Michelle Lappin, and I were fortunate to take this November. Dr. Ernie and Dr. Charlene Brannon (grandparents of first-grader, Isabella Hammerle) sponsored our trip so that we could be a part of the dedication of the Isabella Primary School of Baray. The Brannons sponsor many philanthropic projects throughout Cambodia. One of their passions is building schools to provide the children of Cambodia with an education. The Isabella School is their fifth school in the country.

Mary and I had the opportunity to visit three of the schools and to travel with the Brannon and Hammerle families throughout the beautiful country of Cambodia. We visited the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, fed monkeys, rode on an elephant, took ox cart rides through a traditional Cambodia village and met many amazing individuals. By far, the children at the schools left the greatest impression upon us. They walk, sometimes for miles, to school six days a week where they are fed a nutritious lunch. Often this is their only meal of the day, which why we held a vitamin drive for them.

Tina Kanelos, Middle School Educator

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In designing Tesseract’s upper school program, Nigel and I made several intentional departures from a traditional high school curriculum. In each case these changes were incorporated to better meet our mission and to create a program which was more closely aligned with the way students approach learning. Tesseract's approach to student assessment is one such departure.

While Tesseract acknowledges the value of preparing our students to study for and succeed in taking a traditional “final exam,” we also recognize that this form of assessment is almost never seen in the real world, and that colleges and businesses are increasingly interested in students who can apply their learning in more realistic ways. Moreover, we believe that our students’ future successes will depend upon their ability to select pertinent information, connect information in new ways, construct meaning from these connections, and to present this new meaning to groups in a clear, compelling and flexible manner. Accordingly, the primary assessments in the upper school require these skills.

Portfolio Presentation
At the end of the first semester freshmen recap their experiences through a Portfolio Presentation. In preparation for these presentations the students each write two essays evaluating their progress as students and citizens at Tesseract. In these essays, students draw upon concrete examples from their portfolios to support their observations. They then use these essays as the foundations for presentations to faculty, students and parents.

Sophomore Project
As our sophomores finish their first semesters they are each required to conduct an analysis of one major topic in the Sophomore Project. Sophomore Project topics have been designed by the faculty to give sophomores the opportunity to draw upon the skills and knowledge they have accumulated over the past year and a half, applying them to a new problem to generate a novel result. For example, one project topic asks students to compare the Great Wall of China (appropriate for Mandarin students) to Hadrian's Wall (appropriate for all graduates of freshman Humanities), to evaluate the structure of the wall while considering the topography (using algebra), and to make the case for the creation of a wall somewhere in today's modern world. Other topics students could choose from included Dream the Impossible (American) Dream: Immigration and Citizenship in the United States, We're Going to Need More Princes: Three Cinderella’s, Three Cultures, The Show Must Go On, Good Walls Make Good Neighbors, and Song and Stars: How Math Makes the Cosmos Sound Good.

The upper school educators began discussing the different topics for these projects in August, and over the following five months, they worked to create compelling projects with detailed evaluation criteria. After weeks of preparation, the groups of students prepared a tri-panel and reported on their research and findings to an audience of faculty, students and parents during an evening presentation event.

Chris LaBonte, Director of Middle and Upper School

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After the completion of the first semester, the upper school students took a break from traditional class work to participate in Interim. Interim is an opportunity for students and educators to spend one week engaged in an intensive learning experience. This year, four different Interims were offered. Students had the opportunity to choose from The Sound of Music (a study of the physics of sound and musical instruments), Pedal Power (a study of bicycle maintenance and riding), Refugees (a study of the refugees in Phoenix) and Hohokam Indians (a study of the origins of Phoenix and the mystery of the Hohokams).

For The Sound of Music , upper school educator, Michelle Kramer, had the opportunity to work with Dr. Robert Culbertson, a physics professor from ASU, in planning and executing the course. In the first days, students learned how wavelength, resonance and mathematics all go into the construction of a musical instrument. Dr. Culbertson spent two days with the students helping them work with these concepts and their relationship to musical instruments. Tenth-grader, Sean Pease, said he enjoyed the demonstrations provided by Dr. Bob, especially the vibrating plate and sand designs. “The cool salt was cool!” Then the students each built a monochord (single-string guitar) and mathematically determined where the frets would be placed. They used audacity to determine the actual notes that were being played and compared this to the frequency they had mathematically calculated. Following this, students created panpipes, flutes, wind chimes and instruments based off their own imagination. Tenth-grader, Laura Berry, commented, “I liked building the flute. Power tools are awesome.”

Pedal Power focused on everything to do with bikes. Students had the opportunity to learn the basics of bicycle repair and maintenance from local professionals. Additionally, these new skills were utilized as students and upper school educator, Toby Carlson, volunteered at Handlebar Helpers, an organization that promotes bicycle use and provides bicycles for those who cannot afford them. Not only did the students learn repair, but they also researched bicycle-friendly cities across the globe, and discussed what Phoenix could do to promote more bicycle use as a means of transportation. Finally, Carlson and the students went on many bike rides ranging from a 22-mile ride to Cave Creek to mountain biking on the preserve trails.

For the Refugee project,  students learned about and connected with Phoenix's refugee population in a number of ways. Students and their educator, Dave Whitson, met with local resettlement organizations, including the IRC and LSSSW, and spoke with Arizona's state refugee coordinator. Students also made a furniture delivery with the Welcome to America Project to help outfit two new Iraqi refugee families' homes. The major focus of the week, though, was running basic English language learning activities with refugee children at two Glendale apartment complexes. Each day of the project, the students and Whitson arrived at the apartments as the children returned home from school. Over the next two hours, they colored, ran a scavenger hunt, played with flashcards, and somehow ended up in a massive Play-doh battle. At week's end, two families, one Burmese and the other Eritrean, invited them into their homes for a traditional meal. The students and Whitson were moved by the experiences, and many of the students expressed their commitment at project's end to return to the apartments in the future.

In the spirit of pondering the immediate past, the10th-grade interim project, “The Hohokam: What Happened? ” focused on the mystery of the little known Hohokam civilization--a civilization that spanned from roughly 300 A.D. up until around 1400, when the entire civilization then disappeared into thin air. This project sought to plumb students’ archeological knowledge and their imaginations to come to an understanding of the people who managed to transform this barren region of Arizona into a rich and vast agricultural and trading center. Trips to the Pueblo Grande, Casa Grande and Cave Creek sites and museums and a hike to stand among the Sears/Kay Hohokam ruins, along with tapping into knowledge or information both online at the "Scottsdale Room" of the Civic Center Library, shaped the students’ understanding of these people. Students immersed themselves in such topics as Hohokam pottery, death and burial rituals, preindustrial canal building, watershed thinking, desert building and architecture, and the famous Hohokam "ball courts"--hundreds of which can still be found scattered throughout the Valley. In short, while the students stayed more or less in their exact spot in modern day Phoenix the entire week, they took a journey far away in time, mindset and belief systems that had them "returning" to their lives with a new way of appreciating the desert that surrounds them.
 

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The girls varsity upper school basketball team players continue their unbeaten season. They have a record of 11-0, and are ranked second in the state in the Charter Athletic Association (CAA) Varsity B Division. Through strong team play and outstanding individual efforts from all the players, this season could go down as an undefeated championship campaign. The team is playing Wednesday, February 24 in the semi-finals, and if they win, will play Saturday, February 27 in the finals. Come support the players during their playoff run and quest for the first girls basketball championship!

The varsity boys basketball team players finished their inaugural season with six wins and seven losses. This team is no stranger to close games--two out of three recent games came down to the wire, and Tesseract ended up winning both games by one point! The Tigers secured a 15th seed, and on February 18 competed in the playoffs at a home game. They fought hard, but lost to Scholars Academy. The players worked hard all season and have a solid foundation to build upon next year.

Go Tigers!
 

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This year we held the second annual Medieval Night. Medieval Night is a culmination of what the sixth-graders have been studying in every class for the first semester. It is an integrated thematic unit involving language arts, history, science, art, Spanish and drama. For Medieval Night, students are randomly put into one of six groups, then write, learn and perform skits based on the six areas of study. For example, during language arts, the students had read the novel "Crispin," by Avi, then in groups of four, wrote an adaptation of "Crispin" that could be performed in seven minutes. Only four students performed this skit, making costume changes along the way in order to play different characters. For history class, the students had learned about the feudal system and the different classes and their roles in the system. For their skit, the setting was the Great Hall of the castle and involved a knighting ceremony, and a visit from the local peasants asking for some more time to pay off their food debt to the Lord and Lady. In science, the students were learning about infectious diseases, and their skit focused on the plague. The art room was transformed into a scriptorium as "monks" created illuminated manuscripts and educated their audience to the importance of the process. Spanish students read "El Cid" and performed an act from "El Cid" in Spanish. For drama class, students performed monologues from "Voices of a Medieval Village," enlightening the audience with what it was like to be a particular person from the Middle Ages.

The "stage" for this performance was the classrooms at the middle and upper school campus. Instead of the students taking turns performing on one stage, the audience rotated to different classrooms to see the different skits. It was truly a community event as our librarian, Ms. Copeland, who is a period-costume expert, made sure that the children were in proper medieval attire. We had a strolling minstrel playing music between skits, and the parents helped secure costumes, provide food, put on make-up and help the students put up decorations. Even some of our Medieval Night veterans--our current seventh-graders--came that night to serve as hosts for our parents.

Tami McDaniel, Middle School Educator

To see more photos from Medieval Night, visit www.facebook.com/TesseractSchool.
 

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Engaging Minds Through Service Learning

How does one learn empathy? At Tesseract’s Lower School, students are involved in activities that cause them to consider the needs of others and to find ways in which they can help. Currently our fourth-graders are taking the lead as we collect items to be sent to Haiti. We have chosen to ask for items that the children can send which are theirs rather than asking for money, which is typically a contribution from parents. We believe it is important that students make the connection between the needs of others and their ability to “do something.” Throughout our community we are collecting shoes, flip-flops, toothpaste, gently used clothing and a number of other essential everyday items to be sent to Haiti. It is difficult for adults to imagine the devastation experienced in Haiti this year. For our students, there is an awareness that something bad has happened to others and it is important not only to care, but also to take action.

Throughout the year, each grade has projects through which they become aware of needs and ways in which they can reach out. Whether it be a clothing drive led by second-graders to benefit burn victims, animal rescue support by kindergarteners and third-graders, or support of less fortunate children in the greater Phoenix community by our first-graders, Tesseract students know the value and personal sense of reward that comes with giving.

Kathleen Dunne Millar, Director of Lower School

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Join us for fun, educational summer sessions for early childhood through rising 12th-grade students!

Offerings include Soccer, Basketball and Volleyball Academies, Digital Filmmaking, Musical Theater, Writer’s Workshop, Underwater Adventures, Mysteries & Puzzles, field trips, guest speakers and more.

The 2010 summer brochure and additional information about our sports academies is available on our Web site. 

For more information, contact Natalie Hirst at 480.991.1770 or nhirst@tesseractschool.org.

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The TPA Cultural Enrichment Committee is excited to announce the Arizona Opera will be bringing their Opera in a Box program to the Doubletree Campus April 5 through 9 for this year’s Tesseract Artist in Residence. The Opera in a Box program is designed to introduce students to opera while also allowing participation in a mini-performance with the use of props, interaction with performers and more. The final performance will be accessible to all students and their families. The Arizona Opera will also be providing free tickets to a dress rehearsal on April 21.

The upper school’s Artist in Residence program, also funded by the TPA, included a workshop by the Southwest Shakespeare Company and a field trip to the "Julius Caesar" performance for the ninth and tenth grade. After the performance, students were engaged in post-show discussion. The seventh and eighth-grade students went to a separate production at the Herberger Theater. On February 3, the two grades attended "13," which was the first Broadway musical to have a cast and band consisted entirely of teenagers.

 

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Raising Arizona Kids Camp Fair will be held at our Shea campus on February 27 from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. 

We are in need of:

-Four strong volunteers to help set up (roll out and tape down tarps, move bleachers outside and roll up the basketball nets) in the sports pavilion on Friday, February 26 .
-Four volunteers to undo everything from Friday after the Fair on February 27.
-Four people during the fair on February 27 to collect money and hand out food from 11:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. There will be two 1 1/2 hour shifts during this timeframe; two people are needed for each shift.
Please contact Linda Pastori, lpastori@tesseractschool.org, or Donna Cleinman, dguli@aol.com, if you are interested in helping out.

The visual arts department needs someone to photograph and scan some of the students’ artwork. Once the artwork is loaded, it can be uploaded to Artsonia’s Web site. This is a wonderful way your child’s work can be viewed by you, shared with others or be used to create prints and gifts. Please contact Barbara Perez at bperez@tesseractschool.org to arrange a time to come in and to receive more details. The TPA will be creating a Visual Arts Committee for the 2010-2011 school year due to the importance of this project.

The Library Committee could use a few extra volunteers to assist with the Scholastic Book Fair. Sign-up sheets with short shifts listed will be posted in the entryway at both campuses. Please contact Donna Cleinman at dguli@aol.com for Doubletree campus questions or Stacey Parker at staceyparker@cox.net for inquiries regarding the Shea campus.

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Please join us for the 2010 Green Tie Event, Casino Night, “Putting on the Ritz,” an evening to benefit Tesseract School students featuring dinner, dancing, silent auction, open-play casino games, and a Texas Hold’em tournament.

Putting On The Ritz
Friday, March 19, 2010
6:30 p.m. – 12:00 a.m.
The Ritz-Carlton
Phoenix, Arizona

Go to www.tesseractgreentiegala.com to buy your seats today!

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Tesseract's paintball event, "2010 The Year We Make Contact" was postponed due to rain.  The event will be held in April; the new date will be announced soon.

For more information about this event, please contact the development office at 480.991.1770.

www.tesseractpaintball.org

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Be sure to stop by our Tesseract Summer Learning Adventures table at the Raising Arizona Kids Magazine 7th Annual Camp Fair!
There will be entertainment, prizes, food and fun! For more information about the Summer Camp Fair, visit www.raisingarizonakids.com. For more information about Tesseract Summer Learning adventures, contact Natalie Hirst at 480.991.1770 or nhirst@tesseractschool.org, or visit www.tesseractschool.org.

Raising Arizona Kids Magazine Camp Fair 2010
Tesseract School - Middle and Upper School Campus
Saturday, February 27
10 a.m. – 3 p.m.

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