We are thrilled to share a unique and heartwarming biweekly activity happening at Unquowa: our 8th-grade Spanish students are bringing language learning to life by reading children’s books in Spanish to our kindergarten students every other Tuesday.

This program not only allows our 8th graders to apply their language skills in a meaningful way, but it also introduces our youngest learners to Spanish in a fun and engaging environment. 

These storytime sessions create opportunities for connection, language exposure, and community building across grade levels.

This weeks Antarctic like temperatures were a perfect time to study penguins. Our Pre-K students loved learning all about these flightless birds. We focused in on Emperor penguins, measuring ourselves against a life sized model and pretending to be a father emperor walking with an egg on our feet. We also learned about lots of other types of penguins and the class can now easily identify several different species. One non fiction story we read was about a pair of male chinstrap penguins at the Central Park zoo that formed a bonded pair, made a nest and even raised a orphaned egg proving love is what makes a family! Penguins were woven into our math lessons as well as we created prey-predator patterns and made shape penguins as crafts. Today we experimented with thermometers and tested if a layer of blubber could keep you warm in freezing water. Even though the experiment worked we decided unanimously that we would not want to be an emperor penguin stuck on an egg in the cold for months at a time! Makes our winter days look a little less bleak.

All of Lower School thoroughly enjoyed the performance of “The Elves and The Shoemaker” at the Sacred Heart University Edgerton Center for the Performing Arts. Everyone learned about the importance of “how” and sang along to many holiday songs, including the Unquowa Winterfest favorite, the Twelve Days of Christmas. We even did the Hokey Pokey, now that’s what it’s all about. A huge thank you to Patty Carver, our Performing Arts Department Chair, for this special field experience!

The entire Unquowa community participated in our own election on Election Day in order to decide on a very important issue… LUNCH!

In October, we had such a fun time introducing students to numbers and colors in Mandarin! We learned to ask “How old are you?” and “What color do you like?” and even how to reply to those questions.

Our classes were filled with exciting activities and lots of practice, and the students were enthusiastic about everything they learned!

The third graders also enjoyed their very first culture class, where we took our communication sheet outside to practice. After that, they got to have a blast playing shuttlecock kicking (jianzi). I’m so excited to see all the amazing things we’ll do together in November!

PreK students started Indigenous Peoples Day by being invited to reach into the three cauldrons and guess what they were feeling! Two were filled with dried beans and corn but the large one was filled with the gooey insides of a spaghetti squash. I had the students pick the seeds out of the mush. We heard a story about the Native American gardening technique known as three sisters. For math students used the dried beans and corn to create patterns during fine motor skills activities. For science that day we talked about what living things need and conducted an experiment planting seeds without these needs for observation.