Students today come with a cell phone attached to their hip, a laptop computer in their bag, and a video game console on their dresser. So it’s a little surprising to poke your head into a middle school classroom and see students with yarn and knitting needles creating scarfs, socks, and hats.

A MS student works on a knitting project

But that’s exactly what’s happening in the new middle school elective on knitting. In fact, it has become so popular that it is being offered for a second term this year and many of the students who have already taken the class are signing up again.

For 40 minutes, twice a week, teacher Jenna Wolf works with students on their creations — everything from socks to bracelets. Students also do significant work on their own time. It’s not uncommon to see middle schoolers knitting in the hallways between classes.

Some of the more advanced knitters are now making stuffed toys, learning techniques like Fair Isle Knitting (which involves knitting with two colors to create ‘pictures’ in a knitted project), and even writing their own patterns and handing them out to the other students.

A (almost) completed sock

For the second offering of the class, Ms. Wolf will be providing students with a pair of knitting needles and a large skein of yarn to get them started on their first project. She also noticed that the knitters were transporting their work in plastic grocery bags which sometimes caused their stitches to fall off the needles. To combat this problem, she gave each student an eco-friendly tote to house their knitting supplies.

The class was seventh grader Charlee M.’s first experience with knitting and now she wants to take it each time it is offered.

“I love how knitting teaches you patience,” she says.

So far Charlee has created a hat, a pair of socks, and a scarf. She is currently learning how to make a beret, and in the future hopes to make a bag, a pair of mittens, a sweater, and a stuffed animal.

For more pictures of Ms. Wolf’s students in action and some of their creations, check out her Flickr album.

Students (and one teacher) perform at the House Chamber Concert

Inspired by the recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Beaver’s chamber music director Joanna Goldstein devised a novel way to challenge her upper school student-musicians to “reach for the gold.” Ms. Goldstein turned the group’s annual House Concert into the “Chamber Olympics,” complete with professional judges and gold, silver and bronze medals for the participants at the finish.

Held the afternoon of March 4, the Chamber Olympics was the culmination of two weeks of individually graded recitals and and intense rehearsals to prepare the students to perform in “Bradley Hall Stadium” before an audience that included Ms. Goldstein’s colleagues in her acclaimed woodwind quintet Vento Chiaro, as well as their families and other spectators.

The “Opening Ceremony” featured Vento Chiaro performing music by Jacques Ibert and Maurice Ravel.

The “Athletic Competition” that followed placed the eight students in four different ensemble formations and put them through their paces performing pieces by Strauss, Ravel, Handel and Tchaikovsky. The students were joined by upper school history teacher Oris Bryant on trumpet in one of the pieces. After each recital the judges held up score cards, and one judge would then lead a short master class with students re-playing a section of the piece several times to improve their performance. Next Vento Chiaro played a blues suite by contemporary composer Gunther Schuller.

The “Closing Ceremony” was a collaborative performance that gave the students the chance to share the stage with Vento Chiaro. The entire group played a spirited reprisal of the waltz, “Tales from the Vienna Woods” by Johann Strauss, jr. The video of that piece is posted below.

Final exams usually conjure up images of students sitting at their desks, pencils in hand, darkening bubbles or writing in a blue book. Students in Melissa Catarra’s 10th grade U.S. history course were instead given a final assignment which asked them to examine the events they studied from different perspectives.

Here is one part of the assignment:

• Write a one-page essay for each perspective on the event/conflict assigned to your group: 2 essays per event/conflict
  
• Provide evidence (examples) to validate your perspectives
• For each analysis of the event/conflict, make a connection with current events
  
• Each student is responsible for writing four of the one page essays
• Read, edit, and help your group members

The online textbook created by 10th grade U.S. history students

One group of students decided to create their own online textbook to address these issues. They called it A New Perspective: Lessons From the Past for the Present and Future. Their work looks at events from the Compromise of 1877 up to the Iranian Hostage Crisis of the early 1980s.

We invite you to take a look at this exceptional work by clicking the link above or the image at right.

Students in the Latin American Art, Music, and Dance course recently were assigned a project choose a Latin American artist and represent that artist’s work in some way. One group chose to produce a video about Ecuadorian artist Ramon Piaguaje.

Guest post by Upper School science teacher Jennifer DesRochers

Ms. DesRochers gives a dogfish shark to a student.

Dissections are something that make most people go “Yuck!”. When I was in high school, our biology teacher had us dissect a worm and a frog. I was fine with the worm, having gone fishing many times, but I could not bring myself to cut into an organism that I used to catch in puddles in my backyard. Dissections have raised a lot of ethical questions- is it right to euthanize organisms so we can study their internal organs? Do they suffer or feel pain during this process? Is there a better way to study internal anatomy? Though I could spend a lot of time debating the ethics, the simple truth is that students get the clearest pictures of internal anatomy when they are actually looking at an organism and seeing where all the organs fit inside the body cavity. In this anatomy class, students dissected a sheep brain to look at the neuron organization, and then a frog, shark, and pig. The goal was to compare organs and organ systems across taxonomic classifications- an amphibian, a cartilaginous fish, and a mammal. Here are what students had to say about the dissections:

Two students begin dissecting their dogfish.

“In the past few weeks, our anatomy class has dissected a frog, a dogfish, and a pig. Although these organisms are classified differently, they have many similarities. A frog is an amphibian and spends part of its time in water and other times on land, while a shark spends all its time in the water. The pig’s anatomy is the closest to that of humans. I found it cool that sharks had 2 slits as a nose (Rostrum). I found it interesting that shark’s intestines were spiral compared to that of pigs and humans, which are coiled. Doing these dissections gave me a better sense of the location of all the different organs within the bodies. I was also surprised to find that the livers were so big compared to the stomach that were a lot smaller than I had expected. The small intestines also did not seem “small” to me. Overall doing these dissections was beneficial to me because I learned how to actually cut open organisms and learned to locate different organs.”
~Jon H.

“Although the dissections put me out of my comfort zone, I learned a lot from them. I never truly pictured or imagined opening up an organism to look inside. I didn’t realize how large the liver was either. I pictured it to be a small, non central organ, but it is a large part that is very central. I thought it was extremely interesting when we opened up the stomach and were able to see the food the animal was digesting at the time they were euthanized. My group found a hook in our shark.”
~Joanna G.

Students dissecting a dogfish

“All the dissections were very interesting to me because all of these organisms fall into vastly different classifications. Sharks are extremely different from the other we studied because they spend their entire life in the water. As a result, sharks do not have lungs. However, they use oxygen through the gills. As water flows over the gills the oxygen diffuses and is dispersed directly to the heart. Additionally, they have a compact body cavity which explains why they have a spiral intestine. The most interesting thing that I learned was about how a shark’s liver occupies almost all of its body cavity. The liver is immense because it has to accommodate a lot of oil which keeps the shark buoyant in the water.”
~Vanessa L.