An inside look at the Waynflete experience
On May 11, Waynflete’s Enrichment Robotics Team competed in the Maine Robot Track Meet at South Portland High School along with 16 other teams from southern Maine. Students in Grades 4-8 have been participating in the Enrichment Workshop once a week since January, learning how to build robots that meet seven specific engineering challenges.
Continue reading “Robotics team finds success at Maine Robot Track Meet”
Eighth graders welcomed guest speaker Charles Rotmil to Waynflete on May 7. Originally from the Alsace-Lorraine region, Mr. Rotmil lost family members to the Holocaust. He was hidden by Catholic priests and escaped persecution by the Nazis. He shared his story with the eighth grade along with a slideshow of news stories, photographs, and original artwork.
Continue reading “Holocaust survivor Charles Rotmil shares story with middle schoolers”
Working in their history classes in groups of three or four, seventh graders were recently tasked with writing a one-act play to tell the story of a city in Southwest Asia or North Africa through the eyes of someone who lives there. Cities covered included Kabul, Istanbul, Mecca, Baghdad, Dubai, Jerusalem, Cairo, Beirut, Tehran, Damascus, Ramallah, and Marrakech. Students spent a week researching their cities and developing their plot and characters. After building their knowledge about the historical, geographical, and cultural background about their cities, students wrote their plays to depict that information, collected props and costumes, memorized their lines, and rehearsed.
This spring, Waynflete seventh graders created the blog “Africa: Past to Present” in their history classes. They shared their work with grade 7 students at Berwick Academy, each of whom viewed and commented on at least three Waynflete projects.
The public platform and the Berwick partnership gave our students a whole new sense of accountability. Rather than producing projects for a grade, they did so for a real audience.
Visit the blog — please comment on posts and share!
Hannah Chappell’s sixth and tenth grade English classes recently gathered to share their creative, personal writing. This winter the sixth graders experimented with expressing themselves and their experiences through both poetry and prose (compiling their entries in handmade books) while the tenth grade students were developing portfolios of personal essays for their autobiography projects. This event allowed students to present the results of their hard work while giving tenth graders the opportunity to connect with and mentor their younger schoolmates.
