Life at Valley

Just another exciting day in The Valley School Pre-Kindergarten with some of our favorite four-legged super heroes. As part of their study of real life super heroes in our community, our Pre-Kindergarten students met the King County Search and Rescue Canine Team.

When you sit down to talk with Valley School Chess Club teacher (and international chess master) Bill Schill, you can be sure that you will be gifted with a story. It will be a superbly-crafted narrative, complete with suspense, villains, heroes, close-calls, lucky breaks, and often the story will turn on a specific move: mostly, a chess move.

One fall day this October, Gillian Toledo saw a truck backing up to the Valley School property with a load of hay bales.  Wrong address, she assumed, and as she was walking over to speak to the driver, a teacher reminded her that the bales of hay were a seasonal addition to the playground.  Kids could play on them and use them as they like—one of the many ways that the school activates the space of “the second classroom.”  She realized that the problem solving and imaginative play inspired by those hay bales was going to be part of the teaching and learning in this new setting.

Light-filled, collaborative, creative, and cozy. These are the ways that third, fourth, and fifth grade students and teachers describe the new Valley School classroom building whose doors opened at the Ribbon Cutting and Ice Cream Social on September 8, 2015, just six months after the demolition of the old administration building began.

You can tell from the smiles on these 4th grade faces that the Spanish game, El Museo, is a big hit. Valley students in grades 1-5 immerse themselves in Spanish class two times a week for a total of an hour; Pre-K and Kindergarten students experience Spanish once a week for thirty minutes.

The Community Alliance of Parents (CAP) is a parent-run collective set up to leverage parent talent and time for the benefit of our school, our children, and our community. CAP supports community building, volunteer coordination and support for teachers and administrators. All Valley School families are members of CAP.

This week 3rd graders completed mini-research projects about animals living in different parts of the world. As part of their larger project, which involves learning about countries of the world and what makes them special, each third grade student collected facts about a specific animal living in their selected country.

What do Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood have in common? Just ask a second grader! This month our students are exploring the genre of fairy tales and what makes them so unique and entertaining. Students are reading and listening to various fairy tales and working as a class to identify the different elements of a fairy tale. Some of their unique features include talking animals, royalty, magic, the concept of "happily ever after", some danger, a strong protagonist or hero, and a clear antagonist. Of course they learn that fairy tales aren't real but often include important lessons for us all. We invite all families to cozy up on a dark day this month and share a favorite fairy tale.

Third grade math students are reviewing and practicing different ways to subtract numbers. By third grade, our Valley students should demonstrate mastery in their simple addition and subtraction facts, but, as they move into adding and subtracting larger numbers, it’s essential we revisit the meaning of subtraction and various methods we can use to show the process of finding the difference.

Events like The Valley School auction on November 7th, take the collaborative efforts of many parents and students. The annual auction has historically been a time that parents can contribute to the school in a wide variety of ways. The planning committee is at the heart of it all, organizing and firming up details that result in the event running smoothly. In addition, there were parents in each classroom that headed up the class art projects, including the one in the photograph above, class reps who sent auction communications out, parents who donated to the auctioned items, photo books that were created of all our students, sixth grade alumni who helped at the event, volunteers who set up and cleaned up, and all the parents who helped make the auction a success by bidding on the items.