Chesapeake Academy's mission: to inspire each student to approach learning with
curiosity and creativity,
pursue excellence in all endeavors,
and act with integrity--
so each can make our community and world a better place.
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The Head's Heads UP
Over the last few weeks, I have had so much fun spending larger chunks of time in classrooms. When I'm lucky enough to mix these longer stays in with impromptu visits, the ones where I hear something interesting while passing by in the hall and lean into the room for two minutes, I finish the day noticeably happier. As a former colleague reminded me frequently, many school leaders make the mistake of staying chained to their office, stuck building educational widgets on a conveyor belt of meetings, losing all connection to what's really happening in the classrooms. While plenty of "other" kinds of meetings are necessary, class meetings are by far my favorite, and easily the most important ones I attend.
That's because time in our classrooms reveals what's really being taught at Chesapeake Academy. Yes, that includes math that I barely understand, writing that puts my own to shame, and world language exchanges fit for a café in Salamanca. There's historical discussion opening students' eyes to both our past and our present, scientific discovery forcing them to rethink their place in the world, and artistic endeavors that beg questions of places within ourselves that we rarely acknowledge. There are students being taught everything from how to make a presentation to a panel of military generals to how to unpack and decode a basic sentence, and all points in between. And all of it is fantastic.
However, what I have been most struck by, and what has given me real pause as I've pondered over the last few weeks, is that's only half the story when you consider the other things our students are learning. There's what our faculty is teaching, and then there's what is actually being taught. And as we stand only weeks away from our accreditation visit from a visiting team of VAIS educators, I'm thrilled that we'll get to show off both.
One of our teachers is consistently modeling what it means to be an adult by showing up here every day with a positive attitude and sense of purpose. This person has been dealt a bad hand of late, and yet they keep smiling at the dealer and patting other players with pocket aces on the back as they rake in the chips. Not only are the students learning about grace and grit in the face of adversity from you, I am too.
Another is an example of what acceptance truly looks like in action, leaving no doubt that all students are welcome in your presence and that who they are is exactly who they're supposed to be.
Another still seems incapable of any action other than giving. Your time, your passion, your energy, your knowledge, your heart - whatever is yours becomes theirs as students, and ours as a faculty, providing a foothold just before the fall.
This list could go on forever, and the longer it got, the more examples we'd see of people crossing over and teaching many (as opposed to just one) of the tabulated lessons. The beautiful truth is that while I have specific folks in mind for these examples, I guarantee if I surveyed our students, teachers, and parents the names given would vary wildly, blanketing the entirety of our faculty and staff.
Of course, none of these lessons are being taught by teachers standing in front of the class declaring "today students, we are going to learna about generosity." That would obviously ruin it - the best lessons don't require a formal introduction. But it's also difficult to track, to quantify, to "grade" ourselves on how we're doing. There is no assessment of humanity on which our students will score highly, and if mastery of these traits ever comes, it's likely to be long into the future. The majority of our students may not even know that they've learned how to be a better human as it's happening, or who to thank when it does.
But, that's ok, because it is happening, and one day their child will know, their colleague will know, their student will know to thank them, as they pass along the same lessons to the next generation. That fact is the true measure of a professional life well-lived, and proof of what's really being taught at Chesapeake Academy.
My best always,
Trip
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Solar Eclipse Party: Please Come!
There is an eclipse coming! Ms. Blake and Ms. Harrison are hosting a Solar Eclipse Party to offer students an opportunity to watch the moon pass between the Earth and the sun casting its shadow on the Earth! The next total solar eclipse visible in the US will not be until 2044.
Join the fun on Monday, April 8 beginning at 2:30 p.m. The best viewing should be around 3:20, and the eclipse should peak at about 3:40 p.m. Solar eclipse glasses will be provided to students, as well as some other special items! Students are encouraged to bring a towel or a blanket to sit on the soccer field and watch the solar event.
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Upcoming Activity Periods Excite Interests
Activity periods started April 5 for third through eighth graders. Activity period is Friday afternoons during seventh period and offers an opportunity for students to discover a new interest, dive deeper into an area of the curriculum, or move and relax. This year's offerings are: paint like Bob Ross, card games, Pass the Bricks (a Lego repurposing effort), coding, relaxation and mindfulness, outdoor sketching, and power walking.
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Map Your Way to Kindergarten!
Kindergarteners are exploring maps and cardinal directions. On a nice sunny day, students went outside to draw a map of their school yard. Of course, when asked which way was north, they all pointed up. Getting a real life walking tour in each direction with the school as a central point corrected this error and brought their learning into real life.
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10 Year Accreditation Update
We are looking forward to hosting the six-member VAIS Accreditation Team April 14-16. Serving as a professional peer assessment of the degree to which a school supports its mission, accreditation is an exciting opportunity to both highlight Chesapeake Academy's significant strengths and identify potential areas for growth. Preparations for this visit have been ongoing for a year, our self study and doc box are complete, and we are now finalizing the last details of a schedule that will include classroom observations, review of policies and protocols, and meetings with various CA constituencies.
At the conclusion of the visit, the VAIS team will deliver their initial report to the faculty and students at a specially called assembly on April 16. We can't wait to remind our friends from VAIS that Chesapeake Academy is one-of-a-kind!
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ERB/OLSATS:
How Parents Can Best Support Students
During Standardized Testing
Chesapeake Academy students will be involved in standardized testing beginning April 22. Students in kindergarten through second grade will be taking the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT), and students in third through eighth grade will be taking the ERB test. Classroom teachers will organize the testing modules to best suit the daily flow of school life, ensuring that no more than two tests are given on a single day. A schedule will be shared with parents once students return from Spring Break.
The OLSAT is a multiple-choice K-12 assessment that measures reasoning skills with several different types of verbal, non-verbal, figural, and quantitative reasoning questions. It is designed to assess a child's performance across a wide variety of reasoning skillsets. The multiple-choice ERB test is designed to provide information about a student's performance in several key areas (depending on grade level): listening comprehension, verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, reading comprehension, word analysis, writing mechanics, and mathematics. The ERB tests provide a snapshot of current student learning that can highlight trends in achievement. They can provide information that helps guide instruction based on an individual student's strengths and areas for future growth. As with any standardized test, general test-taking skills, nerves, and familiarity with testing routines can affect student scores.
Parents play a key role in helping students prepare for standardized tests. Your partnership is critical in helping your kiddo enter each test with a calm presence and confidence in their abilities. With this in mind, make sure that your learner gets a good night's sleep so that focus and energy levels are steady throughout the week. Take time to provide a healthy breakfast that has filling protein and fiber so that brain function is optimal. Be sure to talk about the tests in simple terms so that OLSATs and ERBs don't lead to unnecessary stress. After all, though these evaluations provide a data point for assessment and planning, they are only one aspect of a student’s academic profile. Finally, consider setting your alarm clock a few minutes earlier so that mornings are fluid and don't feel rushed. Organized morning calm is always the best medicine for a healthy, happy school day!
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Collaborations Add Fun to Learning!
Second and fourth grade students at Chesapeake Academy have embarked on an exciting collaboration for a geography project, where they're creating stop-motion videos on assigned U.S. states. Each group delves into researching points of interest, history, bodies of water, and other state-specific information, while also crafting a character to represent their state. These characters will voice over the stop videos, sharing key information about their state, fostering creativity, teamwork, and a deeper understanding of U.S. geography.
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Sixth Grade Sizes Up Measurement Skills
Sixth grade math spent the day before Spring Break playing a version of the game "Head's Up." Students had just wrapped up a lesson on customary units of measurement, so this was a fun way to review! Each student took a turn wearing a different unit of measurement on their head, and their classmates had to try to get them to guess their unit correctly in the fewest number of clues. Great clues included what type of measure each unit was (length, weight, or capacity), or an equivalent measure (such as saying "12 inches" instead of one foot!)
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CA Runner Up in Shipbuilding Competition
In a field of nineteen teams, Chesapeake Academy's Osprey Nest Nautical Repair team was honored to distinguish themselves with their idea for an enhanced hull design with improved scantlings in the Virginia Ship Repair Association's Digital Innovation Competition. Each year the Virginia Ship Repair Association hosts the competition in which teams of middle school students design an improvement to ship design, repair, or safety. Chesapeake Academy's design team was called back as one of the top teams and finished as a runner up.
Eleven fifth through seventh grade students at Chesapeake Academy identified an issue in the shipping industry with hull breaches and created the only novel design in the competition (the rest were re-designs of existing systems). As their design evolved, students interviewed naval officers and shipbuilders and met with Technical Advisor, Robert Beech, the VP of Business Development at Shipyard Staffing.
By the time the team presented their design to a panel of industry experts, they had designed and redesigned their prototype many times, implementing improvements and feedback. Students returned to the Chesapeake Academy campus exhilarated by the experience, crowing about feedback from industry experts, and ready to plan improvements to their process. The team hopes to meet in an afterschool club format next year to give themselves more dedicated time for honing their design and presentation and preparing to answer questions from the judges.
Faculty sponsor Robin Blake commented, "This sort of success fuels more and more engaging innovation! But it only becomes possible when students tackle innovation, design, problem solving and presentation skills from the early grades consistently, building the critical thinking and collaborative team skills required to bring a concept to reality."
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Eighth Grade Visits Jefferson Labs
Chesapeake Academy's eighth grade science students attended the Physics Fest at Jefferson Lab in Newport News. The Physics Fest includes a brief interactive summary of the science and technology at Jefferson Lab followed by experiments involving static electricity, liquid nitrogen and plasmas. Students reviewed the parts of an atom, matter, and how liquid nitrogen can boil when new substances are introduced to it. They also saw the colors of the light spectrum using refraction glasses, and discovered how some colors are not really displayed in plasmas. Students even got to display a mystery atom with a BOHR model using Light Brites, and then demonstrated their knowledge of the Periodic Table of Elements to play Element Bingo.
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, commonly known as Jefferson Lab, is one of 17 national laboratories funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The lab also receives support from the City of Newport News and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The lab's primary mission is to conduct basic research of the atom's nucleus using the lab's unique particle accelerator, known as the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). Jefferson Lab also conducts a variety of research projects using its Free-Electron Laser, which is based on the same electron-accelerating technology used in CEBAF. Managing and operating the lab for the Department of Energy is Jefferson Science Associates, LLC. JSA is a limited liability company created by Southeastern Universities Research Association and PAE Applied Technologies.
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Student Council Update
On Friday, April 5, student council sponsored a fund raiser for “Bridge the Gap,” an effort to support the Baltimore community in the wake of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. Additionally, the group is working on planning their final middle school event, which will be on Friday, May 17 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Details to follow !
Student council is always looking for ways to help our community! If you know of projects or volunteer opportunities that students can participate in, please reach out to student council faculty advisor Catherine Emery.
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Coach's Corner
After a great first session of spring clinics, CA is excited to announce that the second spring session will officially begin on Monday, April 8. Thanks to our friends at Christchurch School, we're able to offer some extra clinics, and here's what's in store for our Ospreys during these four weeks:
Running with Ms. Harrison: Once again Ms. Harrison will lead a group of fearless runners who are on a mission to improve their fitness through this lifetime sport! This group is made up of seasoned runners and Ospreys who are out for a new challenge! Running meets on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Field Hockey with Coach Allen: Field hockey is back again, and Coach Allen is ready to share her love of this sport with another group of Ospreys who are eager for a new challenge! Not only will this group learn some new skills in this fun, fast-paced, and interesting game, but they will also be able to impress their friends with their knowledge of the sport during this summer's Olympic games! This clinic meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Football with Coach Jorgensen: After a successful clinic two years ago, a big thanks to Coach Jorgensen and Christchurch School for partnering with us to offer football again this spring! While there will be no tackling during these three sessions, this clinic will teach Ospreys more about the game of football and give them a brief introduction to a sport that they may go on to play in high school. Football meets on Mondays.
Lacrosse with Coach Dehm: Making a third-year spring season appearance is Coach Dehm, who is always willing to share his love of lacrosse and teach the fundamentals of this exciting sport! Throughout the three sessions of lacrosse, our Ospreys will have the chance to learn just how important stick skills, quick thinking, and teamwork are in this game, and who knows--maybe we have some future high school lacrosse players in our midst! This clinic meets of 4/11, 5/21, and 5/23.
Stay tuned to CA's social media accounts to see photos of our Ospreys in action! It looks like it's going to be another fun spring session!
Go Ospreys!
Coach Allen
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CAPPA Countdown!
Chesapeake Academy Parents and Patrons Association's primary purpose is to support the school program, identifying program needs through close communication with the Head of School and providing support by mobilizing volunteers for key programs, support of the Bell Tower Annual Giving Fund as well as hosting other fund raisers, and most importantly being the school's biggest cheerleaders. Along they way, parents develop a strong connection to the school and to one another: A win/win! There is a way to help for every Osprey!
CA sold 272 butter braids!! The estimated profit is $1,740.00 which will go to athletics. Thank you CA families!. Many thanks to Katie Parker for organizing and executing this fundraiser!!
The CAPPA family picnic is scheduled for Sunday April 21, 1:00- 3:00 p.m.
Teacher appreciation week will be held May 6 through May 10! CAPPA and room parents will be sending families more information as time grows closer.
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Cue Up Your Calendars!
4/5 Report Cards Home
4/8 Solar Eclipse Party, 2:30 p.m.
4/9 Spring Running Session2 Begins, Mondays and Wednesdays
4/9 Spring Swimming, Spring Field Hockey Begins, Tuesdays, Thurs.
Spring Football Clinic Begins, Mondays
4/11 Spring LAX Clinic
4/14 through 4/16 Accreditation Visit
4/15 Tax Day
4/15 Second Grade Swim Begins
4/19 Head of SchoolHoliday
4/21 CAPPA Picnic, time?
4/22 OLSATS Begin
4/23 ERBs Begin
4/24 Tag Day
4/24 PALS Presents Jason Hudy
4/24 Faculty Professional Development
5/1 Dress Uniform
5/3 Interims Home
5/4 Black, White & Bling Auction
5/10 Frontier Museum/American Shakespeare Center, grades seven and eight
5/16 ARTStravaganza, all students attend
5/21 LAX Clinic
5/23 LAX Clinic
5/24 Field Day
5/27 Memorial Day, No School
5/28 Exams, seventh and eighth grade
5/31 Last Day of School
6/4 Graduation, required attendance
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Attitude of Gratitude
- Tech Guru Chas Faulkner comes in the evenings to fix troublesome technology and often we don't see him! That does not mean we aren't grateful for all the ways he helps!
- If you have already made your gift to the Bell Tower Annual Fund, your support for CA is already making a difference! Thank you!
- Beth Somers, this year's auction chair has put in untold hours working and planning for a successful auction.
- Sending thanks to CA's faithful supporters in the Faye Society members who have included CA in their estate plans.
- Richard Abbott and Bryan Miller are in overdrive with a team of volunteers to get the campus looking company ready by April 14.
- Thanks to our wonderful supporters at the Hope and Glory Inn our Accreditation Team will be well taken care of, the Faye Society will be honored in style, and some lucky bidder at our auction will enjoy their hospitality!
- Thanks to the Mason and Lula Cole Foundation for a grant to make important security upgrades.
- Thanks to Kenzie Manetz and the members of the Steering Committee for their work in preparing for the ten-year accreditation visit.
- Thanks to the Tidewater Foundation for funding the Osprey Scholarship!
- Thanks to the Wiley Foundation for bringing us another fabulous PALS season!
- Thanks to the faculty whose example teaches so much more than the CA curriculum.
- So much gratitude to the Mason and Lula Cole Foundation for underwriting an upgrade to the hardscape behind the gym to create a multi-use educational/athletic space.
- Long ago some kind folks landscaped the campus, and small additions have been thoughtfully added along the way. The snow drops at the entrance are enchanting. The whole school loves the light through the golden kinko trees in the fall, and our camellias are the best ever! Grateful that someone made this effort that gladdens our hearts today.
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