Greetings from Hockaday! The fall is a busy time not just in the life of our Hockadaisies, but also for the admission team. We enjoy welcoming families to our campus for various events on a weekly basis and we also enjoy traveling around the country and the world to introduce the Hockaday boarding community to prospective families. I recently returned from travels to China, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia where I was reminded once again that the Hockaday community is a global one. We are truly enriched by the diversity of our current and future families here in Dallas and around the world.

As I mentioned, Hockaday remained busy while I was away! The second graders practiced dance moves, memorized lines, and built confidence as they prepared for and performed their musical, Bebop with Aesop last week. The third graders are currently filming their classmates’ book reviews and uploading their analysis to an app called Padlet. The girls can then watch the clips to help them make an informed choice of books to read before their next book club meeting. To wrap up their ancient Egypt unit, the seventh graders built pyramids for stuffed animal “mummies”, writing stories of their afterlife on the inside and outside of the structures they created. Our sophomores studied probes sent into space on past NASA missions and they enjoyed learning what the spectroscopic equipment reveals about the universe. In Precalculus, the girls are using their hands to build a “unit circle”, which is a foundational concept when working with trigonometric functions. This weekend, roughly 700 area students will join our debate team and coaches to participate in the annual speech and debate tournament, culminating on Sunday with our Women’s Round Robin tournament featuring Worlds School Debate. Finally, students and faculty enjoyed dressing up and celebrating Halloween last week. Our Boarding community hosted a celebration of Día de los Muertos and two of our students were honored to have their short film, “One”, screened on Halloween in Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia at “Bloodfest!” which is described as, “the coolest, scariest, international Horror Film Festival for kids.”

Whether it is during a campus tour, parent visit, financial aid information night, or our diversity and inclusion event, or perhaps at a school fair or gathering in your local community, I look forward to spending time with you and your family.  For more school news and events, as well as admission information, please visit our website, www.hockaday.org.

All my best,

Maryanna Phipps
Director of Admission and Enrollment Management

The Institute for Social Impact represents a distinctive and innovative approach among K-12 schools, using the power of engaged, hands-on learning to prepare students for leadership in their communities, workplaces, and society. Through both new and longstanding partnerships with Dallas-area organizations, the Institute allows students to engage with diverse partners, learn from civic leaders, tackle projects with community impact, and put their creative ideas into action for lasting social benefit. Read more here.

After studying a few Spanish festivals and comparing and contrasting them to festivals and traditions in their own culture, students currently taking AP Spanish Language and Culture classes each created and presented their own regional festival and included all the customs associated with it. In addition, they created an advertising brochure to attract people to their festival. Their presentations were stellar and the themes ranged from music, nature, history, mindfulness, sports, fashion, health, and seasons, to name a few. In other cultural news, the Hockaday kitchen staff (SAGE Dining Services) celebrated Diwali yesterday by cooking traditional Indian food for the students. 

Fifth Grade Science students are learning how to code EV3 devices (aka Robots). During the Robotics unit, the girls learn programming using Lego Mindstorm software. The missions they code maneuver the robots to move around tables, play songs, blink in a variety of colors and even make animal sounds! Sixth-grade students learned about atoms, elements, and modules. They discovered the periodic table is a scientific resource that determines the atomic structure of the known elements. In seventh grade, the students explored convection currents in the atmosphere.   

Did you know we have a Parent Education Series? Every few weeks Hockaday has guest speakers present to our current parents. Topics have ranged from how to raise an adult with author Julie Lythcott-Haims to adolescent technology usage with our Director of Technology and our Middle School Counselor. This week, we had Kay Wills Wyma ’84 join us. She is a blogger on MOAT (Mother of Adolescents and Teens), a mother of five, and an author. In her warm relatable style Ms. Wyma confronted societal issues – from the comparison epidemic to the entitlement trend to life’s pressures always making us feel overwhelmed. She encouraged our parents and offered remedies (plus a little laughter). She has appeared on NPR’s Think, the TODAY show, Glenn Beck, CNN, the New York Times, and Focus on the Family. She has published three books: Not the Boss of Us: Putting Overwhelmed in its Place in a Do-All, Be-All World; I’m Happy for You (Sort of, Not Really) Finding Contentment in a Culture of Comparisons; and “Cleaning House: A Mom’s 12-Month Experiment to Rid Her Home of Youth Entitlement.