News & Events
News & Events
Upcoming Events
Open House ::
Saturday
February 4th, 2012 - 10:00 am - 12:00 noon
Come meet the teachers, visit with parents, see the classrooms, talk to alumni, find out about our unique curriculum and get your questions answered. Get a taste of what is so compelling about the school that parents drive for miles to bring their children! Bring your children to join in activities in the classrooms. Find out about openings for next year. Refreshments are served.
"The Village School taught me how to try and gain real understanding out of learning. I know how important it is to understand things, not just know them. The Village School also gave me a very unique environment growing up, because it supported me as a person. I always had a solid confidence in who I was, and where I came from." - K.W., Village School alum
Please call 978-249-3505 for more information or to schedule a visit.
Past Village School Events:
The Village School Play! - To Weave or Not To Weave
To Weave or not to Weave is the tenth annual play written and performed by children at the Village School. Every year, the children draw on their understanding of the year’s theme subject to choose a focus for the play. When the class began to discuss ideas for this year, it was unanimous that we should not set our play in the coal industry, as two previous classes had done. Instead, the children tried to find develop a plot that would have roots in the mills of Lowell and the building of railroads. In the event the railroad theme withered, though there are still traces of it in some early scenes.
Another plot line emerged only after we had already begun writing the script. Tom Putney, the Vermont farm boy in our play, is working on a new plow, made of steel. Tom is based on the life of John Deere, who came to our attention when 4th-grader Julia Henshaw chose him as the subject of her research report. Deere was a blacksmith who, like our Tom, made an improved plow from polished steel. Our play ends with Tom setting out to manufacture his new plow, and his success is implied. Imagine his name on millions of green agricultural machines across the world, and you get the idea.
As always, the script is a joint effort by the students and teachers. Together we work out characters and plot, and the children write their own versions of each scene. The teachers -George and Wendy, assisted this year by intern teacher Myra Chapman - take the children’s individual scripts and combine them to form a composite text. We re-write lines and early scenes as the class’s picture of the whole play comes into focus. Characters are chosen so that every child has a part.
Sets are designed by art teacher Renée Malowitz, and the Wednesday afternoon before the performance is now a traditional session of set painting for the whole class.
Mass. Cultural Council Awards the Village School a STAR Residency Grant
The Mass. Cultural Council, a state agency, awarded The Village School a STAR (Students and Teachers Working with Artists, Scientists, and Scholars) Residency grant for Isaac Owen Richardson, a Village School graduate, and a musician and composer, to spend a week at the school, teaching singing and preparing the students to sing in recording studio sessions. The residency takes place from March 14-18.
The end result, a CD of All School Sing, the favorite songs sung by Village School children all together every Monday morning, will be available for all parents (whether or not their children attend the school) to sing with their children.
Isaac Owen Richardson began studying classical piano with Elan Sicroff at the age of five. His love of music brought him to Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School (PVPA), where he immersed himself in the world of pop, jazz and rock music. At PVPA he played in an R&B band and sang in the award-winning jazz a cappella group 5-Alone. His passion for music inspired him to further his studies in music and he is now a senior at Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying Composition and Film Scoring. He loves to compose music, whether it's classical, jazz, avant garde, or world music. Isaac received the Berklee Youth Concert Symphony Hall Award and he is one of three Berklee student composers featured in Berklee’s Student Awards Composition Concert on April 11 in Boston at David Friend Recital Hall. He is also the keyboardist in an indie-folk-rock band Moss Points North. Isaac is looking forward to a career in composing music for film and performance. He states, “It’s an honor to be able to give back to the school that encouraged my creativity when I was a young child. I look forward to working with the Village School students.”
MATH NIGHT REVIEW in the eyes of parents:
On Wednesday evening, November 17th, Village School parents came together at school. We met with Polly Wagner, the school's math coach, and we explored the many ways that math teaching and learning have changed since we were kids. It turns out that there is an amazing contrast between the abstract concepts and tables that were drilled into our heads in grade school, and the way that the kids at The Village School are learning to think about mathematics and numbers today.
Over the course of the night, we repeatedly discovered that what one of us thought was an obvious way to solve a problem wasn’t necessarily the most obvious way to everyone else. Whenever Polly took us through an exercise, we would find that there were at least three or four different ways of going at the problem--each of which arrived at the right answer. We discovered that, in keeping with the general philosophy of The Village School, even in math the kids learn that there isn't just one way to solve a problem. They learn to think about how to solve the problem, to work together on the solution, and to appreciate the fact that other kids may go about solving it in an entirely different way. Ultimately, there may be ways of problem solving that are more or less efficient, but as long as you get to the right place, each way is equally valid. And, of course, that's one of the things that we love most about The Village School. Contrary to some of the math-phobic parents' original fears, Math Night was fun! For some people it was the most fun they'd had with math in many, many years. That was really the best part of the night. If you missed Math Night this year, you should be sure to attend next year--it's absolutely worth it.
-Sarah and Terry Briggs