Tuesday, June 09, 2009

The Case for Year-Round School (from Experiences in Arlandria)


In Sunday's Washington Post, reporter Brigin Schulte wrote about The Case for Year-Round School as she's seen it develop at one of our neighborhood schools, Mt Vernon Elementary:

"At their Alexandria public school, my kids have learned how to sail, designed entire cities in cardboard, built skyscrapers with toothpicks and marshmallows, performed in a musical and built and set off rockets on the front lawn. They've created passports and had them stamped after 'visiting' countries around the world. They've learned CPR, calligraphy, Japanese, rollerblading and how to make art like Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. My daughter was in kindergarten when she came home bubbling about Picasso's Rose period. In Spanish."

"My children attend a year-round school. And these are the kinds of hands-on, big-project classes that are taught during 'intersessions,' or short breaks throughout the year that take the place of the long, lazy, Huck Finn summers that most Americans have come to think of as an inalienable right of childhood."
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