(Photo above: (L-R) Amanda Holdredge, Grace Downer, Annelise Norkitis, Savannah Kane, Max Trenz, Greg Conrad | courtesy of Seven Peaks School)
Over the past several weeks, Greg Conrad and Amanda Holdredge have been guiding their 7th graders at Seven Peaks School through a study of World War II. In Language Arts, they read and discussed Hitler Youth, a powerful nonfiction book about the German teens and pre-teens who Hitler recruited to work (and die) for his cause.
As the culmination of the unit in language arts, students have researched, practiced and delivered a spoken word performance, an oral interpretation of a poem or fiction/nonfiction excerpt, which ties in to the character whose scrapbook they are creating in Mr. Conrad’s Humanities class. Student objectives are to communicate their own interpretation of the text, to find greater meaning in the text, and to understand that these pieces of text are so much more than words, but lasting reminders of our history.
If this sounds like a high school or college learning endeavor, it’s because the education these children are experiencing is based on a framework called the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program. Students are encouraged to embrace and understand the connections between traditional subjects and the real world, and become critical and reflective thinkers. The IB program offers many opportunities for the development of communication skills to encourage inquiry, understanding, and to allow student reflection and expression.
Seven Peaks School Middle School students are IB learners and the school culture is one where excitement around learning is the norm. It’s also a place where you’ll find happy students thriving in art, music, P.E. and Spanish classes and nearly all of the students participate in after-school sports, band or other extracurricular activities.
“Hearing the spoken words of classic and contemporary poets we learn that we are not alone, that men and women always have felt as we feel, that the human spirit has been the one constant in the history of our kind. In this way the recitation of poetry brings history to life; in this way it creates community.” — Poetry Out Loud (National Endowment for the Arts & Poetry Foundation)
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