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Time has flown by, and here we are, the last day of school. The grass is back to bright green, the trees are full of leaves, and the birds chirp proudly. Tatnall is a beautiful place to spend your spring, as classrooms extend to our impressive campus, and I continue to feel lucky to be here.

Over the last few months, we enjoyed cherished traditions such as Swarm the Hive, the 4th and 5th grade VIP Dance, STEM night, Earth Day celebrations, and May Day. Home & School hosted an amazing Spring Day that was well attended by both current families and many new families who were on campus enjoying our Spring Open House. The Tatnall T-Party was back this spring, and I loved seeing so many of you cheering on your horses.

The excitement for exploring our curiosities never slows down in the Lower School. During the second half of the school year, our students challenged themselves to think more deeply, wonder more widely, and create with more ingenuity. Please enjoy reading about some of the highlights from our spring semester: 

• During Community Gathering, every Lower School student led Community Gathering multiple times during the school year, kicking off the public speaking training that has become an integral part of Tatnall’s learning ecosystem. Lower School families generously donated 1,584 sandwiches during Community Gathering to the Emmanuel Dining Hall in Wilmington!
• First grade students wrote opinion pieces for their favorite Syd Hoff book, illustrated a picture, and created a “commercial” in media literacy. Both their writing pieces and QR code links to their commercial are on display this summer in the Wells. 
• In science, students explored core concepts through engaging projects.
  • First graders studied the characteristics and needs of plants, ending the year with growing plants in the science classroom!  
  • Second graders discovered geology during our rocks and minerals unit, including a fossil dig and starting personal rock collections. 
  • Third graders dove deep in their study of climate change, first assessing their own carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions before creating speeches on a certain climate change topic.
  • Fourth graders studied the scientific method by designing and conducting their own experiments. They analyzed their findings and presented their results at the 4th grade science fair! 
  • Fifth graders have been utilizing the scientific method in a variety of experiments and labs, including creating and testing their own Alka-Serltzer Rocket to see which variables would make the rocket shoot up higher.
• Second-grade students read The Kidnapped King from the A to Z Mysteries series. As a culminating and collaborative project, they created a storyboard retelling for each chapter. Then, they drew settings and searched for pieces to build characters and props from Legos. They put it all together into a Stop-Motion Lego Movie with Mr. Burton. QR codes for this project are on display this summer in the Donaldson Wing. 
• Students have learned about several different artists, including Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Claude Monet, Faith Ringgold, Jean Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Yaacov Agam, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Klee, and Alberto Giacometti, and created works of art inspired by them!
  • Notably, four Lower School artists were selected to have their works featured in the Pacem in Terris’ Traveling Visionary Peace Youth Art Exhibition.
• Fourth grade students learned about the birth of our nation. We studied the causes and some of the famous battles of the American Revolution. Students wrote an informational book about a topic from the war, and we visited The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, as well as Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. The students also dove into Greek Mythology and learned about different aspects of Greek culture, as well as the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. We read through various Greek myths and held book-clubs to discuss the similarities and differences of the stories. Our studies culminated with entertaining performances of two Greek plays: Atalanta & the Great Race and King Midas & the Golden Touch! Costumes and scripts are on display this summer in the Donaldson Wing. View photos from the plays here.
• As fifth-grade students wrapped up their time in the Lower School, they packed in as many problem-based learning opportunities as possible including:
  • creating “mummified” hot dogs after learning about the mummification process and completing a cross-curricular art project that had each student create a funerary death mask used in ancient Egypt. Students built Parthenons out of paper for Greece, and after studying Rome, tested and built aqueducts and participated in a Roman Feast.
  • hosting a bake sale where they calculated the cost of each ingredient, the total cost of the recipe, and the cost of each serving before deciding upon a sale price for their special recipe.
  • building their own miniature Mini-Golf, which required accurate measurements and calculations to determine the perimeter, area, and volume of complex shapes. 
  • tested (and chased) their own model rockets after learning about Newton’s 3rd Law. This year’s Rocket Launch, a long-standing Tatnall tradition, was a huge success.
• Third-grade students learned how to play the recorder, and fourth- and fifth-graders learned how to play the ukulele in two different ways. All students in grades first through fifth learned how to sing music using music syllables to strengthen their sense of pitch and motion of the music.  
• Second graders engaged in a cross-curricular study of China, integrating reading, social studies, art, technology, and writing. After reading The Magic Tree House: Day of the Dragon King and Fact Tracker China: Land of the Emperor’s Great Wall, students used clay in art class to make their own Terra-Cotta Soldiers based on the facts they gathered about them. Then, they created a guided tour of the Emperor’s Tomb using a green screen. Second-graders didn’t stop there! They made paper mache puppets in art and performed a Chinese folktale, The Empty Pot, in our “Tatnall’s Theatre De Marionettes.” 
• Fifth-grade students entered the Young Writers Mini-Saga contests throughout the year. Students wrote 100-word mini-sagas based on various story topics: Hunted, Missing, and The Glitch. Eight students submitted 18 stories, were recognized for their work, and became published authors; some students obtained this honor two or three times!
• Third graders participated in a Mini-Society Project, a continuation of the collaboration involving Mr. Burton, Mrs. Echternach, Ms. Stubbs, and the University of Delaware. Students learned beginning details about economics and commerce. This included the idea of various types of resources and how scarcity can make things more valuable. We also discussed various business considerations such as expenses vs. revenue relating to net profits. Each student designed and started their own business and created a set of products to sell. As they worked on these products, students were also responsible for daily jobs to earn money. Students made advertisements and tabletop displays to sell their wares at Market Day. During this event, students were able to buy and sell products using the money they had earned during Mini-Society. 
• Lego League is a longer-term fifth-grade project that began during the first days of school and culminated in two robotics competitions in February. At the regional competition, our teams won four awards (1st Place for Innovative Project, 2nd Place for Robot Design, 2nd for Innovative Project, and 2nd for the Core Values Award), and at State, teams won three awards (the Rising All-Star Award and 1st and 2nd Place for Robot Design). 

While remaining committed to providing high-quality programming for your children this year, I would be remiss not to mention the buzz of excitement found around the Lower School as we look to the future. 

Within our academic program offerings, we continue to look towards the latest educational research to ensure that we build a solid foundation for our young learners so that they can effortlessly move to problem-based exploration to drive curiosity and innovation as they age into the upper elementary and middle school years. After piloting Bookworms Reading and Writing this year, we will move to full implementation next year, thus shifting to a comprehensive literacy program grounded in research and knowledge building. Additionally, after partnering with the University of Delaware for the current year, it became evident that choosing one HQIM math curriculum for the entire Lower School would bring both consistency and efficiency to our math instruction.  We are excited to announce that next year, we will implement Open Up Resources K-5 Math (OUR Math) in all lower school grades. OUR Math is a problem-based math curriculum that requires flexible thinking and a deep understanding of math concepts. We will continue our partnership with the University of Delaware as we learn how to best transition to this new curriculum next year. To learn more about OUR Math, please click here. 

The musicality of the Lower School students continues to impress me.  This year, every day after school, you could hear music coming from our Lower School students taking music enrichment classes.  Next year, we hope to encourage even more students to learn an instrument outside of music class by offering strings ensemble to fourth and fifth grade students during the school day; strings students will have a featured performance during the school year! Ms. Higgins will lead the Lower School Strings ensemble. More information will be shared in September, with the ensemble beginning in October!

This year, several of our high school and middle school coaches and players offered athletic enrichments this school year, including lacrosse, basketball, soccer, and football.  These enrichments were widely successful, both for skill development and community development.  It was really special to see the relationships formed between the young and older athletes. I can’t wait to see what the 2024-2025 LS athletic partnership will bring. 

Perhaps the most exciting change we are looking forward to is the addition of Kindergarten! We can not wait to have a traditional elementary school program offered in the Lower School. The renovated Kindergarten classrooms are nearly complete, and they could not look better. They are both simplistic and bright. A blank canvas ready for student work and imagination. Marilyn’s Kinder-Garden is also nearly complete.  Several soon-to-be kindergarteners have already tried out the sandbox and the fort. 

Thank you for an incredible first year here at Tatnall. I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish in year two! 

I hope you have a wonderful and restful summer break.

Sincerely,

Kimberly Wagner, Ed.D.