Sign up for April 5-6 Conferences
February 26 - Early buses begin
March 3, 4, 9 and 10 - Drama Performances
March 12 - 23 - Spring Break
March 26 - Late buses resume

The Academy strives to give students opportunities to reflect on their learning and progress in school. While they are supported by a team of peers and adults, it is ultimately the students that are responsible for setting goals for themselves, tracking their progress, and gathering and responding to feedback. Twice a year, at the end of the first and third quarter, students are responsible for reflecting on their learning and progress toward their goals through facilitating conferences in each discipline that include their parents or guardians, and teacher. These conferences will put students in a leadership role, rather than in a typical conference role of bystander, as they lead the discussion about their successes and areas for growth while responding to questions and feedback from the adult participants in the conversation.

We ask everyone to please sign up for a conference slot as soon as possible. If you have multiple children at the school, you may sign up for multiple slots (if you wish). We will then create a schedule for when you are here so that you have 15-minute sessions with each individual teacher during your conference period. We will do our best to stick to the agreed-upon schedule, but unforeseen circumstances sometimes require that people must remain a few minutes after their scheduled end time in order to meet.

Thank you. We look forward to seeing you all in person. Please remember that there is no school for students on Thursday afternoon (4/5) or all-day Friday (4/6).

The Academy Parents Council invites all families to come out of hibernation and reconnect with other Academy families over a round of bowling.

We've rented the Shelburne Falls Bowling Alley and will provide pizza - you bring the family! For questions contact Diane Bigelow or Paul Catanzaro.

Hope to see you there!

Invitations will be going out before Spring Break for our April 13 all-day visit day for current grandparents and other special adult friends of our students. If we don't have the names and contact information for your child's invitees, please send that information to Martha Tirk by next Friday, March 2.

Students and teachers watched a TED talk by psychologist Dr. Susan David in advisory today on emotional agility. Though the ideas presented in the talk - including how we not only tend to qualify emotions as either positive or negative, but also judge ourselves and others for experiencing the latter, as well as the power of learning to name and process emotions without letting them take us over - are relevant always, this feels like an especially important time for all of us to attend to our emotions. 

Biology Students use spinach leaf discs suspended in water to study the rate of photosynthesis under various conditions.

On Friday, with the help of increment tree borers from Paul Catanzaro, 7th grade students analyzed past climate and the growth of trees in the upper field in their Climate Connections course.

While in Cuba over Spring Break, we will be visiting the Korimakao Cultural Project, a performing arts center in a relatively rural area of the island with a mission to provide music and dance opportunities in an area with less access than that available in more urban settings. Participants range in age from 13 to 30. They could use things like guitar strings (classical or acoustic), flash drives and external hard drives for music storage, instrument tuners, drumsticks, drum patches, guitar picks, flutes, and violin strings. These things are expensive and not always easy to come by for them.

As a school that values the performing arts, it will be exciting for us to see and hear what the Korimakao folks are working on. We'd love to bring some of these items with us, so if anyone wants to make a contribution to the effort, please send in supplies before Spring Break. Contact Phoebe Walker or Martha Tirk for more information. Thanks for your consideration

Project Upcycle with Heather Micka-Smith

Please click here for notes from our most recent Academy Parents Council Meeting. We'll next meet on April 3 (exact evening time and Greenfield location TBA).