Jerrica Liao, grade 5, continues to improve her swordsmanship at regional and national tournaments. Liao fenced in the Super Youth Circuit, a national points event held in San Francisco the weekend of March 19-20, finishing third in Youth-10 (Y10) girls foil, out of 21 competitors. She won five out of six pool bouts and two elimination matches before being eliminated in the semifinals. In the Y12 girls foil event, the bouts were tougher; Liao still won three out of five in pools, but drew a very tough elimination bout against the number 14-ranked girl in the U.S., and was eliminated, finishing 17 out of 33 competitors. As of March 21, Liao is ranked number 10 in the U.S. in Y10 girls foil and 39th in Y12 girls foil. In February, Liao finished third at the Regional Youth Circuit, in San Francisco in Y10 girls foil and sixth in Y12 girls foil.
Katherine Zhu, grade 5, was named Player of the Year in the 10-year-old girl division by the USkids Golf Bay Area Winter Tour 2010, after she competed in the USkids Bay Area winter tour championship in early March in Half Moon Bay. Zhu was in the last group of 190 players and finished her windy, rainy round at 6:30 p.m., in the dark. She eagled the fifth hole (par 5) and finished with 38 shots. Zhu ranked number one following the event for the winter tournament session and thus received the player of the year award. In late breaking news, Zhu finished first in the Girls First Flight of the Junior Tour of Northern California – Spring Series III, at Diablo Grande Golf Course March 26-27 with a combined score of 169. Junior events include ages up to age 18, making Zhu’s effort all the more remarkable.
On Feb. 4, the lower school held an exciting Valentine’s assembly, complete with teamwork, dancing and presents for Harker kitchen, maintenance and support staff.
The first activity was a relay in which the students ran to grab a construction-paper heart out of a hula hoop, then ran back to their homeroom where they worked with fellow students to assemble the heart into phrases like those found in conversational heart boxes (Be Mine, Friends Forever, etc.). Each homeroom teacher wrote down the phrases, and after time was up, the homerooms with the most phrases won.
Next there was a Freeze Dance competition set to fun, energetic love songs. Students who were able to stop moving and stand completely still when the music stopped stayed in. Since there were several champion freezers, those who never got out each won points for their homerooms.
At each spirit assembly, homeroom teachers award their homerooms points for behavior, good sportsmanship, spirit and the like, and these points get added to the total, with the top three homerooms at the end of the year awarded a party.
In a show of grand spirit, the service and spirit club members put together 26 Valentine’s goody bags for all the kitchen maintenance, garden and support staff.
A new global education project is launching at Harker.
Harker grade 4 and 5 students will be corresponding and exchanging cultural items with Ethiopian students at the Andinet International School (AIS) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The idea came from Jennifer Abraham, Harker’s director of global education, who worked at AIS from 2004-05, when the school had only pre-K to fourth grade students. The school now boasts all twelve grades and is opening a college. Though most students are Ethiopian, it is also an international draw, with students hailing from countries all over Africa, Japan and the U.K.
Abraham said she thought the pen pal project would be a fun way for the students to learn about each other and dispel any misconceptions they have about each other’s countries.
Lower school social studies teacher Tobias Wade said that in addition to student-written letters, the Ethiopian schoolchildren will be receiving copies of Harker students’ “cultural cookbooks,” as well as a CD showing our students on the playground. The cookbooks come from a project completed earlier in the year in which students brought in their favorite recipe from their cultural background.
Harker News Online will update this story when the response from Ethiopia arrives.
History was made in early March as Pat Walsh, lower school math teacher, was finally defeated after 30 years of playing spoons with students. Walsh has been hosting the card games at his home since the early 1980s and had never lost a game until this month. His wife, Terry, Harker’s archivist, was on hand for the momentous game.
“He lost this one fair and square – I witnessed the historical moment,” she said. Matt Walsh ’97 was on hand as well and noted his father usually plays against fifth graders, while this game was against eighth graders. “He couldn’t compete with these eighth graders – the girls had him right from the start of the game,” Matt Walsh said.
Pat Walsh said the game started as an icebreaker when he’d bring his homeroom students over four at a time on Friday nights. Now the game is a Harker Family and Alumni Picnic auction package.
Losing the game has always had consequences. “I used to have the kids play a prank on a neighbor of mine I am friends with,” said Walsh, “and usually at least one kid wants to lose because they are so excited about pulling off a prank.
“Now, the night usually ends with us going over to Kate Shanahan’s (Harker’s lower school English department chair) house,” he added. “We usually TP her yard, ring the doorbell and run off (known in the prank business as ding-dong ditch it or ring and run).
“This year, Kate was sick, so we TP’d her classroom instead,” Walsh added. “I set the kids up: I left the room and Sarah Leonard (primary division head) ‘caught’ them in the act. Lots of laughs!”
In addition, the students made prank phone calls to some of the Walsh’s other Harker pals, Rebecca Williams and Mike Bassoni, who were prepared for the prank calls and did their best to turn them around on the students.
Walsh publicly owned up to his loss to the four girls, Emma Malysz, Delaney Martin, Zoe Woehrman and Alyssa Amick, all grade 8, in assembly a couple weeks after the event, paying homage to the victors and presenting them with long stemmed roses.
In February, the Lip Sync show provided some welcome entertainment to grade 4 and grade 5 students. The latest installment in this yearly tradition featured performances of songs by Beyonce, Drake, The Supremes and more. As the title of the show suggests, the performers lip synced to the songs while performing entertaining and often hilarious routines onstage.
The show was performed and produced by grade 5 students, teachers and staff, who organized the show in addition to auditioning the performers and providing technical support. Lower school technical theater teacher Danny Dunn and dance teacher Gail Palmer provided additional support behind the scenes.
One stand-out number featured students Anastasia Cheplyansky, Amanda Clausen, Nicole Chang, Stephanie Swanson and Shelby Guarino, grade 5 English teacher, performing The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” in candy-themed outfits. Taylor Kohlmann and Olivia Long also wore eye-catching attire during their pantomime to The Supremes’ “Stop in the Name of Love.” In one of the most memorable numbers, Neeraj Aggarwal and Harrison Buss strutted onto the stage with a dolled-up Joe Connolly, lower school dean of students, to the strains of the Beyonce hit “Single Ladies.”
During a special March 3 assembly, grade 5 students were treated to an entertaining and thought-provoking presentation on Internet safety by six middle school students: grade 6 students Alexis Gauba and Zahra Budhwani, grade 7 students Logan Drazovich and Chandler Nelson and grade 8 students Jonathan Armer and Jai Ahuja. The presentation, titled “Pause Before You Post,” warned students to take precautions before posting content online. “This is a difficult message for adults to get across to children, yet it is crucial because whether they are using e-mail, IM, a blog or a social networking site, their actions have enormous ramifications,” said Angela Neff, middle school assistant director of technology.
The students spoke about difficult topics such as cyber-bullying in a mature, yet light-hearted, manner that captivated the fifth grade audience. “They were at once sincere, articulate, intelligent and funny,” Neff said.
The presentations were the culmination of a monthlong collaborative advisory-based digital poster and video project led by Neff. The goal of this project was to get students to think before they post online content that could be hurtful to themselves or others. Each advisory’s poster answered a question that students should ask themselves before posting, such who will see their posts, who might be hurt or embarrassed by them and what their family or teachers might think upon seeing them.
Presenters also covered real-life examples of the consequences of hurtful online posts, discussed how the project made them think differently about what they post online and urged students to tell parents or teachers about online harassment.
In addition to the presentation, laminate posters illustrating the lessons learned at the assembly were posted around the lower school campus to keep the lessons fresh in the minds of the young students.
Grade 1 celebrated Valentine’s Day with a special breakfast event at the Bucknall gym. Parents were invited to join in on the fun, which included a breakfast of waffles, fresh fruit and juice as well as a special student activity that involved making heart-shaped valentines on which they wrote something they liked and why. The valentines were then posted on a larger heart that was displayed in the first grade homerooms.
The homeroom teachers also shared stories with the kids, who were asked to dress in red, white or pink to mark the occasion. Later in the day, the students exchanged Valentine’s cards in their respective classrooms.
“The children had a great time, the parents had a chance to socialize with other parents and spend with their child at school,” said Diann Chung, grade 1 homeroom teacher.
Harker grade 1 students celebrated the 100th day of school on Feb. 15 during their morning homeroom classes with a variety of fun activities. Students were encouraged to bring in 100 items. “All first graders were encouraged to bring in 100 items,” said Cindy Proctor, homeroom teacher. “We had pennies, Legos, marshmallows, beads, keychains, pens, pretzels, SillyBandz and much more.”
Students even used the “100” theme as creative inspiration, making the number “100” out of corks or pasta, and even writing their name using 100 pieces of cereal.
During their math classes, the students all did activities related to the number 100, such as writing their names as many times as possible in 100 seconds, stamping sets of ten with rubber stamps, making necklaces out of 100 beads and flipping a coin 100 times then graphing how many times it landed on heads or tails.
In mid-January the lower school gym was packed with students, faculty and staff – all in pajamas – ready and excited to donate to a good cause. The reason can be traced back to one young Harker student.
Four years ago, Harker third grader Rishi Narain sat down to watch the “Oprah” show. The show’s guest that day was Genevieve Piturro, founder of the Pajama Program, a nonprofit dedicated to delivering warm sleepwear and nurturing books to children in need. Seeing thousands of pajamas and books donated to children who never had them inspired Narain to bring the program to Harker, where he organized the lower school’s inaugural pajama drive.
Four years later, the event is bigger than ever.
The assembly itself was a raucous affair. In addition to all the lower school students, there were also “big people in the audience,” as Joe Connolly, lower school dean, put it in his introduction to the event. The “big people” were sophomores, who had come as part of the Eagle Buddies program.
Eagle Buddies, still in its first year, was an initiative suggested by Butch Keller, upper school head, in an effort to bridge the campus divide. Third and tenth graders are matched together, and according to Carol Zink, upper school history teacher; the third graders get fun, older role models, “while the sophomores get a chance to lighten up and be kids for a little bit.”
The buddies stay together for three years, until the sophomores graduate and the third graders matriculate into middle school. “It’s been going more smoothly than I could ever imagine,” said Keller. “I couldn’t be more pleased with what we’re accomplishing.”
After Connolly’s introduction, Pallie Zambrano, co-president of the Pajama Program’s Northern and Central California chapter, expressed thanks to the Harker students, reminding them that each donated pair of pajamas would change the life of a child in need.
Next, Keller replaced his suit jacket with a bathrobe and reclined on a rocking chair to read “We Are Going on a Bear Hunt” to the children. All the students got involved during the audience participation part of the reading, with special zeal coming from the sophomores, who may or may not have been coached beforehand.
Finally, the students spent some time reading to themselves and with their buddies. Big Buddy Michaela Kastelman said she enjoyed spending time with her buddy because it brought her back to the experience of being in third grade. Kindergartner Andrew Fox wasn’t too sure of what was going on, but he was very excited to be in his pajamas. “They’re not as tight as my uniform!” he exclaimed.
All in all, the event was a huge success, with Harker students donating 727 pairs of pajamas and 204 books, a school record for the program.
In November, grade 5 students were given a fun preview of their future lives as middle school students during Step-Up Day. Students toured the Blackford campus, met with faculty and staff and learned more about the various aspects of middle school life, such as the BEST program, athletics, laptop options, foreign language classes and electives. The grade 6 choir, directed by Roxann Hagemeyer, also treated their friends to a special performance to give them a sample of what the middle school performing arts department has to offer.