Oak Knoll’s Hope Memorial Library in the Upper School and the Bonaventura Hall Library in the Lower School offer a spectacular selection of reading and resources for students. Upper School Librarian Elinor Takenaga and Lower School Librarian Betty Castello are experts at pointing students toward age-appropriate casual reading and material that supports classroom projects. In addition to tens of thousands of books, online academic research databases, magazines, and newspapers ensure our students can turbo-charge their passion for learning and their pure enjoyment of the written word.

Just a few weeks before the close of school, Takenaga spearheaded a series of field trips to the local Summit library so that students could receive their public library card and tour the facility to investigate its resources. They discovered that many local libraries now go way beyond offering written resources that students and their families can use over the summer for recreation, college planning, passion projects, and much more. Open the doors to your local library, and you may discover some quirky and welcome surprises.

In a guest opinion essay for the New York Times entitled “What Most American Schools Do Wrong.” Dr. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, writes, “Most parents see the benefit of keeping their kids with the same coaches in sports and music for more than a year. Yet the American education system fails to do this with teachers, the most important coaches of all.”

Though the American education system is failing to reap the benefits of “looping” — allowing teachers of core subjects to work with the same student for two or more years —  Oak Knoll is ahead of the curve. Looping is a crucial element in all aspects of our Lower School schedule from grades one to six.

Perhaps it’s 8:30 p.m., and your preferred method of emergency notification buzzes to inform you that your child’s school will be closed tomorrow due to inclement weather. Alternatively, the notification alerts you to a late start or early departure the following day. 

Snow day decisions bring glee and unexpected freedom to even the most dedicated students. Still, on the part of many parents, they bring anxiety over last-minute schedule changes, not to mention second-guessing whether the school has made the right call and whether other schools in the area are making the same decision.

While the decision to interrupt in-person school due to inclement weather is challenging for all school administrators, it is especially complicated at an independent school due to various unique considerations. Four distinct characteristics of independent schools make them particularly cautious regarding impending weather.

Enjoy some cozy downtime with your youngster during this Holiday Season with any of these “Jingle Book” recommendations from Lower School Librarian Betty Castello. Let them form the basis of new bedtime traditions this year and for years to come. They can also make excellent Christmas gifts or stocking stuffers for the young ones in your life. 

For almost a decade, Oak Knoll has published a Christmas Tech Guide capitalizing on the expertise of our Lower School Technology Integrator to recommend educational technology gifts for young people. This year, as a slight twist on the concept, we are providing a list of seven nonprofit organizations that work to provide educational technology tools, resources, and training to women in technology, older people, and students who are across the digital divide. Perhaps this list will inspire some of us to donate this holiday season to one of these non-profits in honor of someone we love and in place of a Christmas present.

Those who struggle with Executive Functioning can often face challenges with activation (getting started on a project), focus (avoiding distraction), effort (following through on tasks), emotion (self-control and self-regulation), and action (monitoring progress and staying on track).

In a webinar for parents entitled “Executive Functioning 101,” Oak Knoll Upper School Academic Support Counselor Kelly Ross explained, “Executive Functioning is critical for social behaviors, emotional well-being, and goal-directed behaviors.” She stressed that under-developed executive functioning skills are not a character flaw, but a neurological issue, that can affect social emotional skills across the board, but can be improved through targeted assistance.

Though Ross works with Upper School students at Oak Knoll to recognize areas for improvement and assist them in honing their executive functioning capabilities, she offers this advice to all parents on how they can support executive functioning skill development at home.

Technology is everywhere and has become an essential aspect of our school, home, personal, and business lives. Walk into most pre-K or kindergarten classrooms today, and you are likely to see interactive whiteboards, students utilizing iPads, robotics activities, and other tech-based learning aids and apps. By high school, students are engaging in ever more complex uses of technology to learn advanced coding, engineering, 3D modeling, and all manner of internet and artificial intelligence-based research techniques.

The proliferation of technology in education and the need to support healthy media use has prompted many schools to adopt acceptable use policies and other guidelines for supporting mental, physical, and social-emotional growth in the real world measured against the many hours students spend surfing the digital world. 

The Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Business School have joined forces to create the Digital Wellness Lab, and their “Best Practices for Digital Wellness” calls for families to mirror the work of educators by sitting down with their teens to create shared media use agreements in the home.

Labor Day has come and gone and school children across the country are back in class. Joining a private school at any grade level can be a social adjustment, as it can also be for new parents and guardians as they get to know a brand new community and school culture. Will I fit in? How can I get to know others in the community? How involved should I be with the school and other parents?

Fortunately, private schools like Oak Knoll offer a variety of mechanisms and activities to help new parents feel at home and a vital part of the school community. If you are joining a private school community for the first time, or switching to a new school, note the following ideas to more rapidly get involved, stay in touch, and leave a lasting impact on your new school community.

Welcome back to a whole new season of the Happy Kid Project. Throughout the upcoming school year, we hope to bring you a variety of student voices so you can hear in there own words how Oak Knoll is a school that cultivates people with purpose. But seeing as school only just began, we thought we’d use this episode to introduce you to some wonderful adults that are just joining the community. We couldn’t get to them all, but here are just a few of our new faculty and staff as we came together the week before school began to get to know each other and the school during orientation and in-service days. You will find a complete list of new faculty and staff, along with their credentials, here.

After weeks of summer fun, a relaxed bed-time routine, more screen time with video games or nighttime movies, and a casual approach to daily responsibilities, your child may be experiencing some anxiety about the return to school in a few weeks, or may be feeling a little less than excited about the prospect.

Experts say there are a number of ways in which parents can ease the transition back to school by using the last few weeks of summer prior to the start of class to physically and mentally prepare for the new academic year.