From September 27 to October 3, Avenues students will be joining in on the national celebration of our freedom to read. Hundreds of libraries all over the country will be discussing and bringing attention to the issue of censorship by participating in Banned Books week and mounting displays that will highlight the top collection of the books most frequently challenged in our country.
From September 27 to October 3, Avenues students will be joining in on the national celebration of our freedom to read. Hundreds of libraries all over the country will be discussing and bringing attention to the issue of censorship by participating in Banned Books week and mounting displays that will highlight the top collection of the books most frequently challenged in our country.
Kaili Keller joined Avenues in fall 2015 as an athletic trainer and physical education teacher. She brings with her almost ten years of experience in athletic training, both in and out of school environments.
Drew Cortese joined Avenues in 2012 as the drama instructor for the Middle and Upper Schools, after having recently completed a two-year stint as the youngest member of the resident acting company for the Tony Award-winning Denver Center Theater Company at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Beginning in fall 2015, he is also the head of grade nine and focusing primarily on drama in the Upper School.
This year, the Middle School is extending its involvement with girl leadership organizations by introducing a Girl Rising club for fifth and sixth graders.
In the fifth-grade visual arts classroom, students have been working on creating ink monsters! This school year, students are focusing on material exploration and thinking about identity.
On October 14, a dozen Avenues eighth graders, teachers and parents went to Hudson Guild to learn how to be good neighbors as we began to build one of the school’s most important community partnerships.
Yi-Ching Hsieh joined Avenues in winter 2015 as a Chinese teacher in the Middle School and has a wealth of language teaching experience both in the U.S. and abroad.
A New York Times editorial has proclaimed, “Poker Is America.” A Wall Street Journal feature story called it a “Mind Sport” and examined the virtues of the “Mathematic Operations, Psychology & Philosophy Through Tournament Card Play Club,” otherwise know as the Poker Club, at New York City’s Henry Street School for International Studies. Avenues’ own International Card Club, commonly know as Poker, has been offered at part of the school’s extended day program since the school opened its doors.
We were given the incredible opportunity in our seventh and eighth grade assembly on earlier this month of screening ELLIS, a new 14-minute film directed by the French artist JR. The film, shot in the abandoned hospital building on Ellis Island, is narrated by Robert De Niro, who tells the story of an immigrant who comes through the island but finds himself stopped just short of the dream of reaching the shores of Manhattan.
A journey that prepares students to be “at ease beyond their borders” needs to be more than just educational—it needs to allow travelers to form a real connection with a place and the people who live there. In this brief video, it’s evident that the Middle School students on this 10-day educational journey to Beijing have forged just a connection.
The students are passionate about raising awareness around the inequalities faced by girls worldwide.
In fall 2015 Elie Déu became the head of seventh grade, moving up from head of sixth grade last year with the sixth-grade students, while continuing to teach history in Middle School. In addition, because of her experience leading curricular change and her membership on an informal team last year that envisioned the new Middle School schedule in practice, she will also facilitate the WORLD cohort for seventh and eighth grades.
Through a new program we call HIP (High Intensity Practice), Middle and Upper School students at Avenues write with quiet purpose on a variety of prompts and questions.
In addition to offering a variety of sports under the guidance of committed, experienced coaches, the athletics program also provides a supportive and well-rounded environment for students.
Fifth-grade students continued their exploration of new materials through their monster-making practice. In the weeks prior to the Black Rock Forest overnight adventure in Cornwall, NY, students created monster communities in the art classroom.
A glimpse of how students benefit from an environment in which they use the language they are learning in real life situations. Students in nursery through fourth grade at Avenues learn one of the two world languages—Spanish or Mandarin Chinese—in an immersion classroom setting. Older students have intensive classes in one of the same two languages. In line with the school mission statement, they make use of these skills in acts of community engagement and outreach.
One of the founding goals of the HIP writing program is creating a community where strong writing is shared and celebrated. In the week leading up to the winter break, 7–8 grade students were able to take their thoughts about audience out of the conceptual and face a real audience of their peers at an “open mic” reading.
Two years ago, Code.org organized an Hour of Code event to celebrate CS Ed week with the goal to encourage as many students as possible to participate in at least one hour of a coding activity during the week. At Avenues, every student in pre-K through 10th grade participated in a coding activity from December 7‑18.
On February 4, students in the Middle and Upper Schools were recognized for their "superior talent and achievement" in writing. Four students in grades 7–8 and 13 students in grades 9–12 won nearly 20 awards for their writing in the 2016 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the longest-running, most prestigious recognition program for creative teens in the country.
As an Avenues artist-in-residence, Sarah Cameron Sunde is working with several different grades and art forms. In the Middle School, she visited our sixth grade drama classes for two sessions to help students create their own public performance art pieces, based on her work with “36.5.”