The following was written by Suzanne Frischkorn
Fun is the ingredient that brings the fifth grade class together during their first days at St. Luke’s School. Activities like name games, scavenger hunts, team projects and orienteering help students get to know each other and their new environment.
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“In some ways we see our incoming 5th graders as new arrivals, joining a new culture. They come from a wide variety of towns and school districts and land in their new home - St. Luke's,” said Head of Middle School, Gareth Fancher.
“We spend a lot time on community building,” said Fifth Grade Teacher Jane Olsen. “Here, you’re friends with everyone. You don’t have to be best friends with everyone, but you do have to be kind to everyone.”
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Olsen’s class shared the poem, “Come to the Edge,” by Christopher Logue to contemplate the rewards of taking risks.
St. Luke’s fifth grade teaching team finds scavenger hunts to be a great tool for building connections. One of the challenges utilized a grid with personal details about each student—Who has an older sibling in the school? Which student has a twin sister? Another sent students to find the atlas in the classroom, or off to the library.
Team-building is also a focus. On one of the first days of school, teams of two or three students go on a “treasure hunt” together using real orienteering maps, compasses, and the fields and paths at St Luke’s. Later the kids had a picnic and an orienteering adventure on the wooded trails at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation. “They get to run in the woods and it’s exciting and fun for them. It’s a bit of a challenge, but we have parents strategically placed in the woods, too, to set them right if they lose the trail,” Olsen said.
Fancher summed up the greatest benefit of St. Luke’s first days of fifth grade: “This type of orientation gives us a chance, right away, to model for the kids and new families our Middle School Philosophy - that energy and playfulness are qualities both compatible with and essential to serious academic endeavor."
