Coaches Laurel Perotti (Gateway mom) and Lauren Hulphers (Gateway faculty and mom) work with a group of 3rd-5th grade girls to develop healthy lifestyles through running. Here they are making tracks on the Gateway field. Way to go girls! For more information on the program go to http://
Each year, Gateway School 6th graders spearhead our school’s holiday food drive for Second Harvest Food Bank as part of their community service work. Last night several 6th graders attended the Second Harvest awards dinner and accepted the Silver Can Top Elementary School Grind Out Hunger Awards on behalf of Gateway School. Congrats to Gateway parents and students and to the 6th graders for organizing this tremendous effort!
The host committee at last week’s the National Association of Independent School (NAIS) conference in Seattle, selected “Innovation: Imagine, Invent, Inspire, Dream” as their theme for the two-day forum. Among the innovative speakers was Bill Gates, John Medina, and Raymond Van (of Digipen Institute of Technology). Inspirational speakers included Sara Key, spoken word performer and founder of Project V.O.IC.E. (http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter.html); John Hunter, inventor of the World Peace Games (http://www.ted.com/talks/john_hunter_on_the_world_peace_game.html); and Dan Savage of It Gets Better Project (http://www.itgetsbetter.org). There was a third group of speakers who opined more philosophically on contemporary approaches to parenthood and education. The two most provocative were Stephen Carter (author and Yale law professor) and Amy Chua (author and Yale law professor).
Gateway alumna, Sierra Tobin, Class of 2009, returned to Gateway today to speak to the 7th and 8th graders about her trans-formative community service trip to Costa Rica. Sierra spoke eloquently about her experience – ALL in Spanish (very impressive!) and the students had to use their Spanish to ask Sierra about the trip. Muchas Gracias Sierra! What a fun way to practice our language skills.
by Rachel Sattinger, 1st Grade Faculty
This little word, “Yes,” keeps coming to visit me in delightful and unexpected ways.
About 5 years ago I learned the YES! Game from my CircusYoga teachers Erin Maile O’Keefe and Kevin O’Keefe. It’s an acting/clowning/pantomiming game with the basic premise that anything goes, from the realm of fantasy to extreme silliness, from serious to possibly even slightly inappropriate. The Yes! Game creates a space that allows us the opportunity to say yes to anything. In the YES! Game you can jump off a building, ride a purple alligator through the swamp, swim in a river of chocolate, or drive all of your friends in a VW Van to Baja. It’s an incredibly fun game that liberates your inner critic and allows your imagination to be vast and in of charge the experience. It’s pretty different from the way most of us live our day to day lives, which is actually a good thing, because that inner critic can be helpful and important in keeping us safe and healthy in the real world. We just ask the inner critic to step aside while we play the YES Game!
Paper Mache Masks made by Gateway 2nd graders will be on display during the month of March at the First Friday Native California Animal Mask Show at Twist on Pacific Avenue. Artist Reception 5:30pm Friday, March 2nd
I left the Cabrillo Theater last night exuberant and energized from Dr. Siegel’s talk about parenting the whole-brain child. For those of you who have read Dr. Siegel’s book The Whole-Bran Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind, Survive Everyday Parenting Struggles, and Help Your Family Thrive or were at the talk, we learned that by integrating the parts of our brain, and our bodies, we can help our children to become resilient, empathetic, compassionate adults.
Gateway School hosted Dr. Dan Siegel for both a teacher in-service session, and an evening presentation to parents and community members in Santa Cruz. Dr. Siegel’s work in child psychiatry, neuroscience and parent education provided the background for a fact-filled and fun exploration of how the brain works and how encouraging integration within the brain is crucial for developing compassionate, empathic, focused and resilient children.
Gateway School faculty, Board President, and Development Director attended the Mindful Schools fundraiser in Berkeley in mid-February. Gateway School was a sponsor of the benefit evening where Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn spoke about “The Role of Mindfulness in Education” and Ginny and Meg got a chance to meet Jon before his presentation.
Watching my daughter toil away on her biography report – delving deeply into minute details of her subject’s life and getting excited about and sharing each newly acquired fact – reminded me of the biography reports that I wrote throughout elementary and middle school. For my parents, this exercise was an opportunity to deviate slightly from the school’s curriculum and learn about the contributions of African Americans who shaped our country, and instilled in them a sense of pride not easily derived from the school texts and curricula in Marshall, Texas (mom) and Hattiesburg, Mississippi (dad). Even after they moved to an integrated Los Angeles, their primary school experiences had scarce references to people who looked like them. If they were to believe what their texts told them, African-Americans made little to no contributions to American progress. They knew that this was not the case, and they were intent on making sure that their three children understood and appreciated the countless political, scientific, social, and economic contributions that blacks in America made to this country.
