Our first two themes, “ART OF WORDS” and “BOOK ARTS” have activated the BFS Lower School! All students in grades K through 4 are involved in our library Maker Month. With design thinking as a framework for jumpstarting making, we invite students to try new skills and share old ones, while thinking about the processes of […]
Caution! Makers at Work! The PS/LS Library at Brooklyn Friends School has transformed into a MAKERSPACE! For the month of May, all Lower School students will interact with a variety of materials and digital resources during Library class. But what is a makerspace? A makerspace is simply a space designated for creative designing and making […]
The seven and eight-year-olds in our second grade classrooms are developmentally inclined to care deeply about fairness. They have a clarity of conviction around issues of equality that is often inspiring. The newly developed Change Maker curriculum taps into their emerging concept of justice, as we learn about individuals and groups who have contributed to […]
Our third and fourth graders engaged in two fun and unplugged activities (no computers!) to learn about loops and functions in technology class this week. In third grade, students learned that computers are really good at repeating a task over and over again without ever needing to stop for a snack, use the bathroom, or […]
Both our third and fourth grade students are in the thick of using Code Studio to learn about coding concepts such as sequences, events, variables and loops. Code Studio uses a game-based environment to teach coding and often uses popular games that are already familiar to our Lower School students. By engaging our students in […]
As part of the PAT Black History Month Celebration this year, the BFS Service Learning Office partnered with the Brooklyn Historical Society to offer an oral history service learning workshop for Lower School Students. Emily Potter-Ndiaye from Brooklyn Historical Society shares an oral history and photograph of Mary deSaussure Sobers. Oral history is a unique […]
Building on the success and impact of previous years, the BFS celebrations of the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took on added significance and dimension in 2015. For the 4th annual schoolwide “Simple and Powerful” Celebration, excerpts from Dr. King’s speech, “Where Do We Go from Here” were broadcast in and […]
Penny Harvest! by Anna Kotelchuck, 2nd Grade Teacher The Penny Harvest is a longstanding project in our second grade classrooms, and it is an integral component of our math curriculum and our social-emotional curriculum. “Penny Harvest” is run by an organization in NYC called Common Cents. Common Cents was started in 1991 by a father […]
Third graders kicked off their 3D printing unit by working with their kindergarten buddies to create cookie cutters for a baking project. Together, they designed their cookie cutters on paper with pencils and crayons. In technology class, the third graders re-created the paper-and-pencil drawings into the iPad app InkPad. This particular app allows users to […]
The 4th grade ended the 2014 year with our unit on augmented reality and an integrated Library and Technology class project. First, we thought about the meaning of the words “augmented” and “reality”. As a class, we determined that “augmented reality” means adding extra information to what we see in the real world. Then, we […]
Our fourth graders were introduced to a new iPad app called “Adobe Voice” as a way to use technology to create social change in the world. After their Nature’s Classroom field trip in October, students returned with a new perspective on why it is important to protect the world we live in. Students used Adobe […]
In technology class, fourth graders learned about what the Internet is (a network of computers connected to each other) and how the Internet works. After thinking about what we already know about the Internet, students watched a BrainPop video to learn about the specifics of the Internet. One of the coolest facts the students discovered […]
