Peachtown Elementary Blog

October 14, 2015 Peachtown Elementary opened a prekindergarten program in 1999. After a few years of experience, we established a flexible age requirement of 4 1/2 for enrollment. We found slightly older children made much greater gains in our academically oriented program, and those gains were significant. Time and again, we have seen the benefit of giving children that extra year to learn the routine of school and grow in their social maturity, while exploring an academic environment without rigid achievement goals. This past month a widely reported study called into question the value of state funded voluntary prekindergarten programs in Tennessee (Lipsey, Farran and Hofer). Essentially, the study determined through testing and teacher reported evaluations that VPK gave students a significant edge in kindergarten, but by the end of their first year they were losing that edge. By second grade, the VPK cohort was surpassed by students who had not attended VPK. The results were pr...

February 4, 2015 The first school week in January was dubbed Rube Goldberg Week at Peachtown. Students, most of whom had never heard of Rube Goldberg, were introduced to the man and his work. Goldberg was a cartoonist, inventor, sculptor, writer and engineer. His famous contraptions were just imaginative and complicated designs to accomplish the simplest of tasks. The building of a Goldberg-style contraption is an amazing exercise in building play into learning, exercising the creative mind, assembling and adapting simple machines, and, in our case, navigating teamwork. All of the Peachtown students from prekindergarten through eighth grade worked in teams; their first task was to design their contraption on paper and, after a quick review of some basic principles of physics, to identify each energy transfer in their process. The next step was to acquire the necessary materials and build their contraptions in just a few short days. Teams were encouraged to use artistic license t...

Moving into the new year at full speed, Peachtown Elementary students are leaping from a wonderful study of the Middle Ages, replete with a re-creation of a Medieval Faire in York, England in the year 1280, to this month’s intensive study of chemistry. Making curriculum relevant to children is sometimes challenging, but building connections between what is being studied and the lives of students is essential to developing higher learning. Although we are 600 years away from the Middle Ages, that history is still meaningful to today’s students. Last fall, a controversy arose regarding a model first-grade curriculum unit, developed by the New York State Education Department, on Mesopotamia. As is so typical of the overreaching Common Core standards, the spirit of the lesson is correct, but the assessment of student success is not. In the early grades, exposure to ancient history is just that: Exploring exciting stories of the past and building a base of understanding of what civilizat...

October 16, 2013 Almost everyone has heard of dyslexia, or knows someone who is dyslexic. Dyslexia literally refers to any disability that makes it difficult to read. The list of symptoms is as long as the list of testing instruments used in diagnosing the disorder. Estimates of affected people range from 6 percent to as high as 17 percent of the general population. The prevalence of the diagnosis has spawned an entire industry devoted to diagnosis, teacher training and parent support. Few people on the street, however, would be familiar with the term dyscalculia, the parallel disorder affecting numeracy, or basic arithmetic skills, which occurs with similar frequency. Just as dyslexic students struggle with grasping the fundamental building blocks of reading, so do those with dyscalculia struggle with the fundamental relationships between numbers. While there are connections between dyslexia and dyscalculia, dyscalculia is distinguished by distinct deficiencies in numerical cogni...

Jan 7, 2013 We are nearly halfway through the school year at Peachtown, but January always feels like a new start, a chance to revitalize and dig in with new enthusiasm: To review what we’ve done so far, and what still needs to be done. January is fun month at Peachtown. With Wells College on semester break, we replace our regular physical education classes with sledding, and our foreign language classes with independent project time, music, drama, or other special classes. We begin reviewing scripts to select our annual drama production, and we work with our eighth ­grade students as they make their decisions about what high schools they will attend. At the peak of this busy academic year, we also begin the cycle of enrolling new students for the spring and the following year. Open houses for prospective students begin next month and continue throughout the spring. This cycle of simultaneously reviewing, practicing and planning is ongoing. We’ve had a wonderful year so far, studyin...