Our Winter Celebration (photos at bottom of post)
Yesterday’s Winter Celebration has put me in a reflective and tremendously thankful mood. I wanted to reach out and express how grateful I am to the community of Marylhurst and share a bit of what happened over this week.
Thank you to everyone who attended our first ever, whole Marylhurst community event at our Oregon City campus! It was a morning filled with welcome, hope, and peace, designed primarily by our students, and facilitated by all of our teachers and staff. It was wonderful seeing everyone milling about, greeting each other, seeking warmth around the fire, sharing treats, and exploring the different activities throughout the classrooms. Highlights were the student buskers performing original collaborative compositions, the overwhelming success of the Heron-led coat drive for Salem for Refugees, and the community singalong with the Sparrows Tomten poem…and a group Happy Birthday to boot! This being our first whole community event, it came with its challenges, confusions, and consternations, and I appreciate your understanding and patience with getting an event like this on its feet. We’ll learn from this experience and apply that learning to future events.
What you may not have seen was the work and learning that happened Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday leading up to the Winter Celebration, and while most of this activity happened with the kindergarten through 8th graders, I wanted to share it with the Owls, Hummingbirds, and Racoons families as well. In these “Exploration Days,” students were challenged to prepare the campus for the event in a way that would welcome all of our families. They were divided into multi-age groups and tasked with different elements of the event. Here is some of the work the students accomplished over the three days:
Hand-decorated book marks by the Owls to be given as welcoming gifts
Planned and designed signs, in English and Spanish, to help visitors navigate their way to the different activities as well as to welcome them to campus
Created works of art, in different mediums, as backdrops for story rooms and the meditative space
Drew accurate maps of the campus for visitors to use
Wrote haikus and Things To Save poems to share
Fine-tuned and rehearsed original musical compositions to perform
Rehearsed the Tomten poem to recite
Rehearsed Peace Like A River and Light A Candle for the singalong
Cleaned and prepared the village-side of the campus
The Herons also spent time designing their to scale Sumerian city modeled after Uruk and rehearsing for their play.
Along with this work, each day, about a third of the students were challenged to create a pop-up restaurant in 90 minutes - complete with name, logo, motto, and sign - to make and serve a treat to all 120 students on the Heron Creek campus. Teachers stood back, observed, and guided as the students devised and executed a plan for meeting this challenge. The first day was Saucy Pizza, a pizza restaurant, where “Sauce is the Boss.” The second day was Peace Pies, an apple hand pies restaurant. Their motto was “No pies, no peace.” The final restaurant was Diddly Squat Cookie Shop. The motto: “Diddly squat, we hit the spot!” Their specialty: sugar cookies dipped in chocolate. For each of these restaurants, the students made the food by hand, monitored the baking, devised a system for serving the customers, and served over 120 eager - and sometimes impatient - customers.
It was wonderful, fascinating, and revealing to see the ways in which the students took on all of these challenges. Along the way, across ages, they stepped forward to lead, stepped back to listen, had moments of frustration and realization, developed a new skill, made mistakes, lost focus, regained it, encouraged peers, and persevered to see an important piece of work through from start to finish. The various challenges pushed them to take their math, reading, writing, science, and artistic skills and apply them in the real world setting of realizing a pop-up restaurant and putting on a celebratory event for over 130 people. We are excited to take all of the learning and understanding that we developed together over these four days into the new year.
These last few days are one of many manifestations of who we are as a progressive, project-based school. It reminds me of the progressive educator, John Dewey, who wrote, “Give the [children] something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” The doing of this week's real-world project, and the thinking that was required in it, helped the children hone important skills as explorers, creators, and citizens.
Thank you for the opportunity to work with your children in these amazing and significant ways. May your winter break be filled with warmth, relaxation, and joy. We look forward to seeing you all in the new year!
Leif Gustavson
Head of School
