First Day Reflections

first day collage

The first day of school provides a clean slate, a new beginning, and a chance to reflect and reevaluate. The energy today was electric, with smiling children and teachers thrilled to embark on a new year of deep and meaningful learning. Even on the first day students invest time in worthwhile foundations that anchor them for the year ahead.

Students today set goals, learned routines, created classroom norms, reconnected with friends and reached out to new students, and acquired the role of student in a new, unfamiliar grade and setting. They are both whom they were a few short months ago and no longer whom they were. They are in the process of becoming—as they always are, but the first day of school highlights and punctuates this undertaking. While students remember routines of the previous year, they are pointed firmly ahead, ready to embrace the adventures that will make meaning for them and will shape them into the people they are meant to become.

So many transitions proliferate upon our return. Our new Primary Division friends are in the process of meeting their teachers and visiting their classrooms. Parents new to Grades 6-8 learned about the various facets of middle school, from research sources to Advisory. Middle school students will spend this week team building, both here on campus and away at WOLF Camp.

All our students embrace the opportunity to learn routines and develop habits. They are thrilled to be back, creating restaurants with kindergarten friends; playing foursquare and soccer; sharing summer adventures; building community in advisories; and just hanging out on the big field together. They feel their teachers’ delight upon welcoming them back, and they beam with their own pleasure, having been seen, appreciated, and valued in our inclusive community.

James Wright’s beautiful poem, “A Blessing,” ends with the startling image of “break[ing] into blossom.” This is how I see the students upon their return to school, bursting into their new selves, as they passed under the green and gold balloon arch into the new year.

Warmly,
Laura

Dr. Laura Konigsberg
Head of School

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