#ThisWeekAtNCS Blog Highlights

Every week our staff writer, Becca Miller, keeps us up to date on the day-to-day lives of our students in the #ThisWeekAtNCS blog. This communication became more important than ever when we closed our campus in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To learn more about how our students and teachers worked together to make the most of this unexpected situation, visit the #ThisWeekAtNCS blog.

Earth Science Glacier Lesson

Hands-on education is challenging when classes are online, but NCS students and teachers found creative ways to adapt. In Larry’s 8th-grade earth science class, Larry—with help from his daughter, NCS 8th-grader Ella—got outside to demonstrate a glacier lab to his class on Zoom. The students created mini-glaciers by freezing bags of sediment, ice cubes, and water, then they pushed their glacier around in their yards to examine how the object’s movement affected the ground beneath it. Each student drew their observations, which included seeing grooves, striations, erratics, and broken chunks of ice destined to be kettle ponds.

Japanese New Year

In Meredith’s Japanese class, students participated in two traditional Japanese New Year’s activities. The first was Fukuwarai, a game where players close their eyes and try to put the pieces of a traditional face in the correct places on a board. Students learned vocabulary for facial features as well as directions like up, down, left, and right. Kakizome is another traditional New Year’s practice of writing an intention or wish for the coming year using ink and a calligraphy brush. Students chose words to write, learned how to form the characters, and wrote the words and signed their names.

Intersession

While our 9th-grade class was on its annual trip to Utah, where they visited protected spaces like Zion National Park and Valley of Fire State Park, the rest of our student body participated in Intersession, a series of fun and educational classes. Students signed up for morning and afternoon classes that covered topics including stop-motion animation, costume design, Flash Band, swimming, ice climbing, history through movies, and sewing. At the end of the week, the students presented their work to the entire student body during Intersession Showcases.

Earth Day Town Meeting

This year we celebrated Earth Day together with a morning Town Meeting event that brought faculty, staff, students, and families together on Zoom to talk about the significance of Earth Day and the many ways we can care for the world around us. The gathering was attended by over 100 members of our extended community and featured talks and readings, including a history of NCS’s ex- pansive sustainability efforts by art teacher Noni—the granddaughter of NCS founders Walter and Leonora Clark—and some helpful ideas on how to appreciate more and waste less by English teacher Melissa.