18 12:15 | SEMINAR WITH MRS. LEWIS Students in Grade 9 attend a Seminar class with Mrs. Lewis, Park's Director of College and Life Counseling, where they learn about the importance of Upper School and the impact it will have on their lives, both now and in the future. Overall, this class aims to teach students the steps to academic success in Upper School, study skills, and financial planning and goal setting, as well as giving them opportunities to research colleges and careers and attend presentations from area professionals. In today's class, Mrs. Lewis guided students through researching a career of interest and finding a college that offers a major that supports this career. Students then put together a presentation on the college, major, and career and shared it with their classmates. 2:10| ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE WITH MRS. DEGROAT When students arrive to class, they pick a seat at one of five tables in the room. The room is arranged in tables to foster a more collaborative and interactive learning environment. After attendance is taken, they review the activity from the previous day, which then leads into the next topic that they will explore. Their current unit focuses on limiting factors. Today, the class moved to Clement Gym for their in-class activity, which seeks to illustrate the importance of suitable habitat for wildlife and demonstrates the consequences on a bear population when one or more habitat components is relatively scarce. Students become “bears” and search for available food (coded index cards) that are placed throughout the forest (Clement Gym). Some of these bears are assigned additional constraints, such as an injury or poor eyesight, or having to provide for offspring. Once all the food is collected, students calculate the amount of food they have and determine whether they survived. Then as a class, the carrying capacity of bears in the “forest” is determined. A special thank you to our Upper School Faculty as well as Park's Head of Upper School, Charles Hartney, for helping to bring this article to life. They are passionate educators and leaders who truly know and care for their students. We are grateful for their dedication, drive, and energy, which has a positive, lasting impact on our students. 1:15 | INTEGRATED II WITH MR. FEDIRKO A day in Grade 9 math can range from the strictly formal to the exploratory and beyond to the aesthetic. One constant achieved after the students are acculturated to progressive learning is the students’ ownership of the classroom. On certain days, students can be found sharing ideas, adding plausible solutions to their board, questioning their peers about methods and concepts and, generally, being curious and inquisitive. This math class goes deeper and is required to develop cogent arguments in support of any conclusions proffered. This is painstaking work and requires the kind of freedom we are gifted to have at Park. In fact, it often comes as a surprise to new students that they may be given the solutions to a set of problems. Solutions, after all, are of no value if the methods used for their derivation cannot be elegantly communicated or properly understood. On this day, students were asked to take a walk through the Park campus. Each student was responsible for one section of the overall walking path, so they decided how the group would all walk, run, or jump and for how long. Their path took them by the pond, through the woods, along one of the soccer fields, and then back to the classroom, at different paces being led by each student in their turn. After returning to class with their data, the group worked to create one piecewise function that included each “piece” of the path. The final representation of their walk was a single continuous map connecting each student’s path with that of their peers.
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