Village Community School

Wednesday, September 4th marked the start of a new school year at VCS, and we couldn’t have been more excited to see our students again! There is so much to look forward to on the first day of school, including other upcoming firsts - the first time the Class of 2020 will sit on the stage as the student leaders of the school, the first time our 6th Graders will participate in the Upper School Overnight, the first time Kindergarteners will eat in the Lunchroom, the first meetings of Book Buddies and Big Buddies/Little Buddies and so much more! New experiences are excellent opportunities for growth, and we look forward to another transformative school year for our students.

On the morning of their Graduation day, the Class of 2019 gathered in the Lunchroom to begin saying their goodbyes to over 300 members of our community, all of whom were eager to wish them well. A procession of teachers and fellow students in K-7th Grade got in one last hug or high five with each of our graduating 8th Graders before filing down to the Auditorium, where the Class of 2019 took their seats on the stage for one final all-school assembly. Later that evening, thes...e 32 students returned to the stage for their Graduation ceremony, where they each shared a speech reflecting on their time at VCS and what being a member of our community has meant for them. Our graduates’ speeches were full of self-awareness, creativity, fond memories and a deep gratitude for what their time in this school has given them confidence in their own voice and talents, knowledge of what they are most interested in and a lifelong community of friends and mentors: Being here for so long, nine years, has helped me figure out what kind of student, and overall person I strive to be. VCS has taught me to work hard, be myself, and among other things, enjoy moments in school while I have them, because they are fleeting. My team wouldn’t have been able to win the game without support from each other or our coach. This moment is how I feel about everything throughout my years at VCS: we are supportive of each other and everything we do. Although VCS doesn’t normally preach winning as a priority, you do win at VCS. You win by learning to share your thoughts, find your identity, express who you are, and the millions of opinions you have on different subjects. I could not have asked for a better place to grow up than Village Community School. You all replaced my hopes of being invisible with a confidence in being invincible. The most important thing that my time in the Upper School has done for me is shaped who I am as a person and helped me discover myself, whether that be through helping me form my opinion on different issues, challenging me to think about my outlook on education, and even life in general, or giving me confidence in who I am. VCS provides a space where you are comfortable in being yourself, and strong personalities, unique qualities, and people’s specific skill sets can be easily woven into the already existing fabric of our lovely community. And even though we’re going to go to a variety of different schools, we, just like a family does, will always stick together. The Class of 2019, like each of the graduating classes before them, remain vital members of the VCS community after they have left West 10th Street. Their class portrait will always hang on our wall, their patch will be displayed on its banner and they will be missed and thought of by all the students, teachers and staff who knew them. Congratulations, 8th Graders we can’t wait to see what the future holds for you!

8th Grade Goodbyes and the 2019 Closing Assembly

On Friday, we marked a favorite VCS tradition of students, parents and staff alike: the Annual Family Picnic! This year’s event offered all the usual cherished Picnic activities: balloon animals, face-painting, hair-dyeing, ping-pong and corn hole, Memory Book decorating, plus a magic show that had students cheering all evening long. Our hardworking kitchen staff kept us well fed, and we loved to see Memory Books being passed around for signing especially between Lower Scho...ol and Upper School students. We’re always grateful to the volunteers who are on hand to keep the event running smoothly, but this year we were particularly happy to see some familiar faces helping out: our VCS alums! Prior to the Picnic, high school-aged alumni gathered in the Gym to catch up with each other over games of basketball and four square, then joined us out in the Big Yard to mingle with staff and former classmates or volunteer at an activity station a great reminder for our graduating 8th Graders that they will always be members of the VCS community. Thank you, parent and student volunteers! Of course, the Picnic would not be possible without the dedicated efforts of our event Co-Chairs, Esther Wahrhaftig and Alexis Bleich. Our heartfelt thanks go out to them as well, and to all who celebrated the end of a successful school year with us at the Annual Family Picnic.

Throughout the year, all of our students from the youngest to the oldest, have been engaging in Tech, STEAM or Coding classes, and K-7th Graders culminated their coding and robotics learning this week at the Robot-Code-a-Thon. This fun-filled event was the first of its kind at VCS, offering students the opportunity to engage in differentiated activities including programming robots, solving coding challenges, engineering programmable designs and interacting with Tech/STEAM ...projects created and facilitated by older students. In the free-flow, self-selecting format of the Code-a-Thon, students practiced different programming languages and focused on different types of robots, but all the activities had one thing in common: they promoted the four computational thinking skills of decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithms. They also highlighted the collaborative nature of computational thinking, as students’ work was encouraged and guided by trained volunteers from 2nd-7th Grade. It was wonderful to see students participating in extensions of their classroom curriculum as well as trying new technologies they had not seen before, and the event was made even more meaningful as students of different ages formed bonds over a shared enthusiasm for coding and robotics.

What a year it has been for our VCS sports teams! In the fall, the 7th/8th Grade Volleyball team took home the D.I.S.C. Championship; in the winter, both the 7th/8th Grade Girls and the 7th/8th Grade Boys Basketball teams won their respective D.I.S.C. Championships and this week, the VCS Softball team brought us to a total of four Championship wins for the year when they defeated St. Luke’s for the D.I.S.C. title. We were happy to see many 6th Graders join the Softball tea...m this year, making it a large team with a lot of spirit. Prior to this week’s Championship tournament, the team had three wins and three close losses in their short six-game season. On Wednesday, they faced off against L.R.E.I. at Pier 40 East for a qualifying game, where our pitcher held the opposing team to only two runs, ending the game with a final score of 11-2. With rain threatening to end the season without a clear winner, we moved on to our Championship game against St. Luke’s, who took the lead until the 5th inning when VCS tied the game 4-4. In the bottom of the sixth, VCS needed a run to tie and at least one baserunner to get back to the top of the lineup. A 6th Grade player came up with a big hit to get our leadoff batter back up to the plate, who blasted an RBI triple, once again tying the game and sending us into extra innings. The game was finally won in heroic fashion by an 8th Grader’s slide under the tag - just as the heavens opened and showered the winners with rain. As if one Championship win wasn’t exciting enough, several of the athletes on this team made VCS history by playing on all three of our Championship teams this year Volleyball, Basketball and Softball! Congratulations to the VCS Softball team and their coaches, and thank you to all of the parents who came out to show their school spirit and cheer on the players. An epic conclusion to an epic year in VCS sports!

In the winter, 6th Graders began learning about the design and infrastructure of cities, including how different city features effect and depend on each other. This spring, the same students studied the effects of a rapidly-changing global climate in their Earth and Human Activity unit in Science class, focusing primarily on the increase in frequency of severe weather events and natural disasters. They then used their knowledge of city infrastructure to consider how cities co...uld be redesigned to withstand and quickly recover from the impacts of natural disasters. This Friday, 6th Graders presented the results of their work at the Future City Expo, where parents, staff and fellow students were able to hear students’ innovative solutions for the various vulnerabilities of cities around the world and see them represented in elaborate models. For the Future City project, small groups of students were each assigned a city and a climate classification coupled with a natural disaster. The groups conducted research into the ecology of the city and identified the causes and effects associated with the natural disaster in their region. Next, they brainstormed strategies to protect their city against this environmental threat, taking into account the ecological features of their city and the interdependence of its infrastructure. To implement their plans, 6th Graders redesigned the fabric of the city, organizing buildings into commercial, residential, industrial and mixed-use zones. In the final phase of the project, students presented their sustainable, futuristic design solutions by using recyclable materials to build city models. These models were on display at the Expo, and student urban planners had prepared written reports and oral presentations that laid out their proposed redesigns. We were impressed not only by their knowledge of city features and detailed proposals for changes, but also by their creativity, and hope Expo presenters and visitors alike will be inspired to implement similarly creative sustainability solutions in their own lives.

On Service Day, 1st/2nd Graders focused their work around farming and gardening; they decorated farm signs for Heermance Farm, wrote thank you cards to be sold at a City Growers fundraising event and tended to the VCS rooftop garden. They also did some planting of their own right in their classroom, and in the weeks since have been carefully tending to their morning glory seedlings, learning firsthand what plants and flowers need to grow. Of course, Service Day is all about h...elping others and contributing to the community, so this week, Group 304 transported the plants they and Group 403 had grown to the Jefferson Market Garden, where they will be planted and appreciated by all of the garden’s visitors. By this time, 1st/2nd Graders knew plenty about morning glories, but the Jefferson Market Garden has all different kinds of plants and flowers growing in it, and a volunteer at the garden shared information about some of their names and classifications. Students were also able to explore the garden as an extension of their year-long community study, noticing the features and functions of a public community space. One of the best things about a community space is that it is always there for you to visit, so while 1st/2nd Grade students may have said goodbye to their morning glory seedlings, they can always return to the Jefferson Market Garden to visit them!

With only a couple of weeks left in the school year, students of all ages are culminating and presenting their work including our vocal and instrumental students. This week, both Lower Schoolers and Upper Schoolers came together to present pieces learned throughout the year, performing two Spring Concert assemblies for fellow students and an evening concert for families. The Lower School Chorus, Lower School Recorder Ensemble, Lower School Band, Guitar Ensemble, Upper Schoo...l Chorus, Quartet, Upper School Recorder Ensemble and Jazz Band, along with several soloists, treated audiences to a wide range of songs, from modern to traditional, Irish to Brazilian to South African to American. It was wonderful to hear the results of students’ hard work, and we are so proud of the progress they’ve made this year. Congratulations to our student musicians, music teachers and instrumental instructors and thank you for a terrific Spring Concert! See more

This year, the focus of the 6th Grade Social Studies curriculum has been Ancient Greece and Rome, and students have had opportunities not only to read and think about the lives of the ancients, but to actually step into their shoes. On Thursday’s Project Day, 6th Graders once again imagined themselves in the ancient world and applied their research into the Greek Olympics by holding their own Olympic Games, right out in the Big Yard. The day began, appropriately, with a ...Torch-Lighting Ceremony in the Auditorium where students were grouped into six city-state teams: Sikyon, Athens, Megara, Corinth, Sparta and Argos. Next, students applied their creativity and their historical knowledge as they designed and painted flags that included at least three symbols representative of their assigned city-state. Each team announced their arrival to the Olympics with the presentation of their city-state flag, and the Games began: Shot Put, Javelin, Chariot Race, Long Jump and Dash. This fun day of physical activity and ancient tradition was only part of the larger study of the Greek Olympics students are conducting. By researching both the history of the ancient Games and gathering information about the modern Olympics, 6th Graders are able to compare the purpose and organization of this competition in different societies and assess the most valuable elements of both, establishing links between the ancient world and our own.

In 4th Grade Science, students have been studying Earth Science, beginning with the earth/sun/moon system. Students acted out and modeled the positions, movements and relationships of those celestial bodies and learned how the movements of the system create day and night, months, years and seasons. Next, students turned their focus to the earth, studying the materials and organization of our planet. To reinforce their understanding of the layers of the earth, 4th Graders cons...tructed clay models representing the materials and comparable size of each of earth’s layers: the inner core, outer core, mantle and crust. And on this week’s Project Day, students considered why the materials of the earth are layered as they are by exploring the concept of density. Students began their density lab by observing the properties of five different liquids: water with green food coloring, honey, dish soap, corn syrup with red food coloring and vegetable oil. They chose two liquids to pour into a test tube, and described in writing how the liquids interacted with each other before testing the effects of adding a third. Based on their observations so far, 4th Graders recorded their predictions of what would happen when they added their fourth and fifth liquids, and provided their reasoning. Once students had added all of the liquids to the test tube and observed the results, they made connections between this lab and all they had been learning about the materials that compose the earth. The way the density of a liquid effects its placement in a test tube, students discovered, is the same way that the different densities of the materials of our planet result in separate layers they had recreated the properties of the earth in a beaker!

After months of rehearsing scenes, memorizing lines, building sets and practicing choreography, our Upper School musical A Year with Frog and Toad finally opened, and parents, staff and students alike were delighted by the three performances of the show. Based on the classic children’s books by Arnold Lobel, this whimsical production follows two best friends Frog and Toad through the seasons of a year, following along with their adventures as they bake cookies, fly a kite..., go sledding, tell a scary story and send a very slow letter. Just as charming as Frog and Toad themselves are their friends: Snail, Turtle, the Birds and others, all of whom displayed their vocal talents in memorable musical numbers like Getta Loada Toad, Cookies and Merry Almost Christmas. This colorful, hilarious musical provided a joyous conclusion to the 2018-2019 theater season at VCS, and we congratulate the entire cast and crew on a spectacular production. Bravo! See more

All year, Big Buddies in the 8th Grade and their Little Buddies in Kindergarten and K/1st Grade have come together to read, draw, craft, build and play. They’ve had lunch together, played outside together and arrived together to our annual Ceremony of Lights. Perhaps most important, they have simply talked to each other, forming bonds that don’t just bring individual pairs of Buddies closer, but make our whole school feel a bit smaller. It has meant so much both to our oldest... students and to our youngest students to build and deepen their relationship over the course of the school year, as Little Buddies became more confident and comfortable with the other students in the community and Big Buddies stepped more firmly into their role as the student leaders of the school. This week, Big Buddies/Little Buddies had their final official meeting of the year, sharing in fun activities like weaving dreamcatchers, building block structures and making drawings. And as the 8th Graders prepare to graduate and move on to high school and the Kindergarten and K/1st Graders get ready to move deeper into their Lower School years, they will do so with so many wonderful memories of their time as a Buddy, which strengthened their interpersonal skills and enriched the 2018-2019 school year.