Bancroft Bulletin: Starting the New Year

By Madeline Sumida, DC Elementary School Program Site Coordinator & Teacher

Photos Courtesy of Madeline Sumida

The Bancroft AALEAD classes got off to a great start with the New Year, demonstrating leadership and compassion with their community service. The kindergarten through fifth grade students donated 24 pounds of food to the Capital Area Food Bank and made beautiful origami ornaments for So Others Might Eat to hang on the organization’s holiday tree.

This new year of 2015 brings exciting changes as we welcome a new teacher for the third through fifth grade class and introduce fun thematic projects about superheroes, mythology, science systems, and more. We’ll explore how we fit into the big pictures of a community, a society, and a world, and how we as individuals add our unique imprints and flourishes. All students had a blast in a team-building scavenger hunt to find magical artifacts from ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian, and classical Chinese legend and lore.  The hunt ended with a feast on pies made from the magical apples of the Norse goddess Idun and the Monkey King’s bananas, liberally doused in chocolate sauce.

Kindergarten through second grade students transformed into a troop of Story Scouts, complete with scout sashes and a special bookmark tool for measuring effort.  As students distinguish themselves with their helpfulness, caring, academic improvement, and other skills, they will earn special merit badges to pin on their sashes. We’re reviewing the essential parts of a story with a song about the 5 W’s (who, what, where, when, why), and we’ll continue developing our language arts skills with readings of folktales and mythology from around the world. Second graders made a Frankensteinian human body out of recycled materials in order to show the workings of the internal system.

We’re looking forward to the fun to come! And possibly more chocolate sauce!