Charles M. Salter Associates, instrumental in designing the acoustical elements of the Rothschild Performing Arts Center and its Patil Theater, tweeted our Harker News story on the acoustical elements of the building.
Charles M. Salter Associates, instrumental in designing the acoustical elements of the Rothschild Performing Arts Center and its Patil Theater, tweeted our Harker News story on the acoustical elements of the building.
On Dec. 8, several Harker performing arts groups gave their annual holiday assembly performances at the lower, middle and upper school campuses. Orchestras from all three campuses made appearances, as did upper school vocal groups Downbeat, Cantilena, Bel Canto and Camerata, as well as middle school singers from Vivace, Dynamics, Harmonics and Concert Choir. The lower school’s Bucknall Choir spread some cheer to their friends on the lower school campus. In addition, the upper school’s varsity and JV dance troupes and Kinetic Krew, middle school dance groups Showstoppers and High Voltage, and the grade 4-6 dance ensemble Dance Fusion performed upbeat holiday-themed dance routines. The shows were warmly received by those in attendance as they headed into the weekend!
Yesterday’s LID Vision Day offered Harker teachers the opportunity to attend a variety workshops led by Harker middle school teachers, some of whom participated in the 2017 LID Grant program. A total of six sessions, held concurrently in various rooms around the middle school campus, gave teachers insight into how their colleagues used the program to bolster their teaching methods.
History teacher Sara Pawloski, English teacher Mark Gelineau and Spanish teacher Julie Pinzas demonstrated Google Expeditions VR by taking teachers on a virtual trip to New York’s Citi Field using special headsets. Science teacher Kathy Peng recapped the fidget spinner projects she had her students conduct using 3-D printers, which provided valuable lessons on how to design group projects that integrate self and peer assessment, project reflection and other useful concepts.
In history teacher Melanie Ramsey’s classroom, teachers learned how visual notetaking could help students better retain and understand the material they learn, in addition to improving their creative thinking. Math teacher Andy Gersh showed teachers how the use of games such as Minecraft could encourage reflection on classroom lessons.
Teachers attending math teacher Hava Sasson’s workshop learned the various uses of Desmos, an web-based graphing calculator that also serves as a collaboration tool, and how teachers can use it to creative unique lessons and assignments. History teacher Keith Hirota demonstrated how to create interactive lessons using software called Apollo, whose simple drag-and-drop functionality makes adding files easy. Students can also collaborate on these files using their own devices as well as access them from home.
Along with the beautiful Patil Theater in Rothschild Performing Arts Center, there are rehearsal rooms, practice rooms and a top-flight scene shop. These rooms support the Harker Conservatory, which graduates between 35-50 certificate students each year, along with the 350-400 non-certificate students participating in performing arts each day. Moving day in February will be the culmination of years of dreaming and hard work.
Laura Lang-Ree, performing arts chair, noted, “We have been involved in design meetings for years, going on on-site visits at other performing arts centers and giving our input as to what works and what does not work.” She can’t choose just one favorite feature, she said, but is enthralled by the view from center stage, the professional fly system, the view from the balconies and, finally, “my amazing, expansive classroom – all the light and space. I think about teaching in there every day,” she said.
Lang-Ree had some performance-specific goals that the new building and equipment will achieve. “The ability to do technical elements like never before,” she said, “to build on site, fly sets, teach unrestricted with the space and sound benefits.”
Its all about the package. The rehearsal rooms alone are enchanting, Lang-Ree noted, “creating a large space for students to rehearse their music with great sound, and the dressing rooms will be spacious and well-lit – a director’s dream!”
Read on for the extraordinary features that will make the building a wonderful home for Harker performers and productions for decades to come!
The Scene Shop The scene shop includes doors almost 10 feet wide that go to the ceiling so scenery can be moved directly to the stage. After working in a remodeled cafeteria for the last decade, Paul Vallerga, Harker’s scenery master, is delighted with his new shop. “I had quite a bit of input,” Vallerga said. “The most important things I recommended were adequate storage and construction space, proper ventilation, and an adequate station for dealing with paint.
Vallerga noted the main features of the new shop are space and a wide variety of tools for construction and painting. “One interesting feature will be a paint frame,” he said. “This is a wooden frame on one wall on which we can hang backdrops or other scenic units to be finished and/or painted. We will install stage lighting at this frame in order to duplicate the show lighting.”
Vallerga noted the salient points for a good scene shop. “Flexibility and access are the key things. A good shop, like this one, has enough space to assemble and work on fairly large complex units before loading them onstage.
“Probably the most interesting thing here is the fly system. This a counterweighted system of battens which will allow the storage and movement of overhead equipment. I’ve twice attended seminars on the safe use of stage rigging and am looking forward to teaching students about it.” Vallerga noted he is pretty excited to get his hands on the new shop. “I’m actually going to have to remember how to do things I’ve never been able to do at Blackford,” he said. .
Rehearsal and Practice Rooms A room is just a room, unless it is fitted out by acoustical experts, in which case there is a lot going on behind the walls, ceilings and floors. Building out ultra quiet rooms took a collaborative effort between Kevin Hart Architecture, Studio Bondy Architecture, Charles M. Salter Associates and The Shalleck Collaborative (see last month’s story).
Architects and acoustical consultants like different things, said Jason Duty, vice president of Charles M. Salter Associates, Inc., consultants to the architects for acoustical matters. Architects tend to like symmetry, but, “acoustically, if we could lay out the rooms, the rooms would have more random placement of panels,” Duty said. “The two worlds have to agree. When you get to design with a guy like Kevin, we show him what we are thinking of and they show us what they are thinking of, and we go back and forth until we find the right combination to satisfy both worlds,” Duty said.
Left/Right and Up/Down Acoustics Acoustical consultants look at the two dimensions of left and right and up and down to plan their sound reduction strategy. Left and right sound management is about isolating adjacent rooms on the same floor by insulating and spacing out the walls. The new building has two floors of rehearsal and practice rooms and the same methods were used on both sets of rooms. All the rooms have fiberglass insulation in the stud cavities of the sheet rock walls, and the sheet rock is up to three layers thick on each side of the walls of rehearsal and practice rooms – that cuts down a lot of sound.
Practice rooms, the small rooms for individuals or small groups, can be constructed to one of two plans, either limited isolation so the teachers can hear students practicing, or more isolation but with a sound-rated window or windowed door, so teachers can glance into see how students are doing. Harker chose the second type and will have sound-rated doors with windows for the practice rooms.
The practice rooms themselves are stand-alone rooms inside the huge, empty space, called a “tunnel,” about 20 feet wide, between the big rooms. So there is a rehearsal room on either side of the building and practice rooms are built as separate structures in the tunnel, between the big rooms, thus insulating the practice room walls from rehearsal walls with air space.
That spacing reduces transmitted sound so the practice rooms and rehearsal rooms can be used at the same time. Even the placement of the practice rooms between the larger rehearsal rooms creates more air space between the large rehearsal rooms, contributing to the sound control between the large rooms, which are expected to have a larger volume of noise.
The tunnel construction also allows for the mechanical distribution of heating and electricity to the big rooms: ducts and electrical wiring come down from the roof above the tunnels. “That makes the architects happy,” said Duty, “as the rehearsal rooms are nice and clean.”
Up and Down Sound Isolation Up and down sound reduction – sound transmitted through ceilings or floors – addresses two types of sound transmission: airborne sound and impact sound. Airborne sound would include a power saw in the scene shop or music in the big rehearsal room. Impact sound are the vibrations transmitted though solid objects by activities like walking, dancing and certain musical instruments that are supported on the floor. Acoustical reduction is measured in decibels and to reduce noise from above or below, architects can just thicken the cement floor; but going from a 3-inch-thick floor to a 6-inch-thick floor only adds about five decibels of sound reduction; going from 6 to 12 inches of concrete still only adds about another five decibels of sound reduction. A better answer is to use air space and layers of sheeting below the concrete lid, Duty noted.
In a small room, like the practice rooms, designers can use standard 2×4 framing to support the sheet rock ceiling, as is done in normal construction of entryways and bathrooms in condominiums; they hang a false ceiling just below the actual ceiling, leaving an air space.
But, noted Duty, “a dropped gypsum board (drywall) is very challenging in the big rooms. The next nicest thing to do is to use spring isolators that provide a resilient connection to the underside of the floor deck to give both airborne and impact isolation between the floors,” so Duty went with the spring isolators for the four large rehearsal rooms.
To further reduce impact noise, room floors on the second floor will also be “floating” on isolators a few inches above the cement deck. Again, the team could have used just thicker floors, but decided on a wood, floating floor, which uses neoprene “pucks” to support the raised floor, isolating it from the cement subfloor. Fiberglass insulation will be fitted between the neoprene isolators, plywood layered on top followed by the finished wood floor.
This method “helps a lot with impact, but even a little with airborne noise,” noted Duty, “So if a subwoofer is sitting on the floor it has a lot more to go through to disturb the lower rooms.” Duty noted installing the floor isolation is like moving a vibrating cell phone from a table, where the whole tabletop becomes a sounding board, to a couch, where the vibration is almost totally deadened.
Along with controlling excess sound, the flooring design in the big rehearsal room has another important but hidden feature, said Duty. “It was designed by Shalleck Collaborative (who designed the theater components of the building) to be basically a representation of what the stage was supposed to be like: dance should feel the same on (both) floors … pretty typical in rehearsal spaces so lifts and jumps feel the same,” he said.
Windows Are Important
Duty noted the design team has carefully addressed noise coming in and out of the windows. Architects like big glass, he said, “but sound guys see it as a big reflective surface. The adjacent walls typically perform better than the glass. We had to do a big study both on the noise coming out and how far away property lines are, and how much noise from Highway 280 will come into the room. The sound ‘exposure’ drives the glass/window selection,” he said.
Sound Transmission Class (STC) standards are used to choose the proper windows. “Assemblies are likely to be double pane,” said Duty. “The STC covers the whole assembly: the frame and how the glass sits in the frame. If air can get though, so can sound.”
The windows are preconfigured by manufacturers. Designers then choose the appropriate window system. “We just order the correct STC ratings and they show us assemblies that meet those ratings,” said Duty. “The architects pick what they like the look of in terms of finishes.”
Intraroom Acoustics
Aside from isolating the rooms from each other and the outside, attention is given to controlling the sound inside the rooms. “The larger rooms are where it gets interesting,” said Duty. “When people are in a room you can hear the person next to you, but what every conductor battles with is, musicians on either side of the room have to hear each other playing so the left-right ensemble becomes a challenge in the rehearsal rooms,” he said.
The acoustical consultants look at the volume of space (cubic footage), not loudness. “First, there has to be enough square footage so musicians are not sitting on top of each other,” Duty said. “Then you plan to have the room behave itself, with no weird echoes or excessive reverberance, but large enough to provide reasonable reverberance.”
On stage in the Patil Theater, surrounded by orchestra shells, the sound has somewhere to go: out into the audience. In the rehearsal room sound hits the wall behind the conductor. “We have to try to deaden the sound so it is not a mess to stand in all day long, while still having participants hear each other to properly rehearse,” said Duty. Rather than just use absorptive ceiling panels in the rehearsal rooms, the team will install pyramid diffusers on the ceiling, which helps send sound across the room.
Sticking to the Building Codes One early challenge that drew all they players together was fitting in the layers of ceiling and floor isolation along with the heating and cooling machinery on the roof to stay below the maximum height allowed.
Duty, Shalleck reps, Kevin Hart and Studio Bondy reps all gathered in front of a whiteboard to hammer out the height requirement. The group had to get internal dimensions right. That took huge coordination to make everything fit. The group had to track every three-quarter-inch thick piece of drywall or ceiling panel to ensure it all fit in the building code height limitations. “That’s what makes these fun,” said Duty. “There are certain things about these types of projects that make them different than standard office buildings – you have to take a lot more care with all the different pieces.”
The mechanical system provided another challenge to the team. “It sits on the roof so we had to worry about that sound coming into the rehearsal rooms as well as disturbing neighbors,” said Duty.
The Quiet HVAC System The heating and cooling system in the RPAC is specially designed to keep noise to a minimum. The actual machinery for the HVAC system sits on the roof, above the practice area, on isolators to separate it from the building structure and to place it as far from the performance area as possible. The machinery on the roof is screened off both for aesthetic purposes and to shield the sound from neighbors.
The auditorium’s mechanical room is located beneath the lobby. Conditioned air is supplied overhead via a series of ducts that travel from that basement room, through the rear curved walls and up to the underside of the roof of the Patil Theater.
One huge sound reduction factor is that the returns, the big vents that suck “used” air back out of the auditorium to re-heat or re-cool, is not a big noisy vent. Instead, about 250 8-inch return vents have been drilled through the main cement deck — one under nearly every seat and the sheer number and spread of the return vents will ensure there is no rushing of air to disturb the audience or performers.
The Rothschild Performing Art Center will open in February 2018. Watch for information on opening ceremonies!
The Harker community pulled together last week to help those affected by the fires in the North Bay, and had the surprise help of an alumna working in disaster relief.
Following the cancellation of the Harker Family & Alumni Picnic in mid-October, the school decided to donate picnic ticket sales receipts to relief efforts in Sonoma County. It was a welcome surprise to find that one of the organizers helping direct donations, Carol Beattie ’65, is a Harker Day School alumna.
Beattie is board vice chair at HealdsburgForever.org, a 14-year-old organization that helps fund various nonprofits in the Healdsburg area, which is assisting the Sonoma County Resilience Fund.
Once the decision was made to donate picnic receipts, the community stepped up the program and mounted a full-on effort to collect needed supplies for the stricken area. Along with $8,500 in picnic receipts, community members chipped in another $1,500 in cash to total about $10,000 in donations that went to the Sonoma County Resilience Fund. The Salvation Army received $2,800 in gift cards and the Redwood Empire Food Bank was the glad recipient of 150 bags and boxes of non-perishable food and pet food.
The donations are all thanks to a concerted effort by a variety of community members including members of Harker’s advancement department who coordinated the efforts.
Students and parents from the lower, middle and upper schools all contributed labor to the effort, with volunteers accepting donations to “stuff the bus” at a drop-off station at the upper school during Friday night’s football game, as well as at the middle and lower schools. In addition, lower school students wrote letters of encouragement to go with the more material contributions.
“I just want to thank everyone at Harker for the amazing job you did,” said Capt. Rio Ray, corps commanding officer, Salvation Army. “You are impacting lives. There are people that have lost everything and now have something because of you. So, thank you, continue to strive to serve others, you are making a difference and making the world a better place. Thank you.”
Redwood Empire Food Bank has served about 85 families a day over the last 12 days and was grateful for the Harker delivery. “Everybody has disasters; sometimes its medical, sometimes is the loss of a job, sometimes it’s just a disruption in your family,” said David Goodman, chief executive officer, Redwood Empire Food Bank. “In this particular case, the Sonoma complex fire has impacted thousands of people who never expected to need food assistance and here they are today. The food that you have given, your generosity, will improve lives and change lives and help people get back on their feet,” he said.
The Rothschild Performing Arts Center, due to open in February 2018, is designed to present a wide variety of wonderful shows to a comfortable audience, and there are a thousand elements, literally behind the scenes, that will enhance that experience. Here is a look at a few of the bigger elements that will make this center an outstanding performance venue for the Harker community for decades to come.
Architects for both the performing arts and athletic centers are Studio Bondy Architecture and Kevin Hart Architecture, which joined forces to design the gym and the theater, including the interiors and the site development, said Kevin Hart.
“As with any project of similar size, there is a large team of in-house architects and designers, consultants and sub-consultants,” he said, “in addition to the general contractor and subcontractors, who have important roles in the design and execution.” Of these many critical subcontractors, two play key roles in the development of the theater technology.
“The theater experts, The Shalleck Collaborative, worked as consultants to the architects to inform the design of the auditorium itself, the stage, rigging, theatrical lighting, orchestra pit, movable orchestra shell, control room, dressing rooms, and many other details,” noted Hart. “They also provided design of A/V systems, including the LED wall in the lobby.
“The acoustical experts, Charles M. Salter Associates, worked as consultants to the architects to design the acoustical qualities of the auditorium, which is adjustable for different uses. They also provided guidance for the acoustics in the rehearsal rooms and designed many of the wall and ceiling assemblies to prevent noise intrusion from outside and improve sound control between rooms.”
Display Wall
The most noticeable item attendees will see is the 34.5-foot-wide, 15-foot-high color LED display wall in the lobby. The display will showcase professional and student work. Once inside the building, the magic of technical theater won’t be as visible, but will provide for a remarkable audience experience.
Orchestra Pit Lift
One of the biggest and coolest pieces of equipment in the new facility is the custom-made, electromechanical orchestra pit lift. The lift is capable of raising and lowering the 48-foot-wide by 10-foot-deep elliptical segment of floor, 332 square feet in all, fully loaded. The segment can be used as a stage extension, for additional seating or as an orchestra pit.
Hart noted the lift platform is a steel superstructure with two interconnected heavy-duty motors which raise the platform on four “Spiralift” columns, Model #ND9, by Gala Systems.
These columns, fascinating pieces of machinery, are created anew each time the lift is used. Motors turn the column bases and a vertical steel band is locked into a spiraling horizontal steel band (picture a giant, high tech slinky) so the column “grows” as it goes up and is disassembled as it comes down, eliminating the need for a deep pit beneath the lift to house the column when in the down position.
Gala Systems noted the system is highly stable vertically and laterally, very quiet, nearly lubricant-free to eliminate any smell and should last the life of the facility with very little maintenance. The system is used in the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and 55 countries around the world. Check out this video on how the system works: http://bit.ly/2yrGTEF. The lift will also be used to move the Bosendorfer concert grand piano from its stage-level closet to underneath the stage if needed. More about this wonderful piano in a future article!
Professional Fly Tower
Another of the major components is the fly tower, containing 35 counterweighted rigging battens for moving scenery, lighting and special effects, and the top of the movable concert orchestra shell. Each batten can be used to raise an item, or they can be used together to raise larger items.
There are three battens for moving the top of the orchestra shell (the back and side pieces roll into place), five battens dedicated to stage lighting and 27 scenery battens, said Jedd de Lucia, a principal at The Shalleck Collaborative. The eight battens that control the orchestra shell and the lighting racks are motorized and can lift up to 2,800 pounds each, while the remaining 27 battens, capable of lifting 1,500 pounds each, are controlled by hand – the counterweights make it possible to move the relatively lightweight scenery up and down by hand. The rigging and lighting equipment is accessed via a series of perforated metal catwalks that run the width of the fly.
Sound and Acoustic Tuning
The main audio control console will be a Yamaha QL5 mixing board, said deLucia. This state-of-the-art soundboard was chosen for its versatility, ease of use and compact size. These soundboards are in use in many venues worldwide.
“The speaker system has a left and a right line array for the main PA speakers as well as supplemental ‘fill’ speakers at the front row as well as below and above the balcony,” noted de Lucia. The system uses the ARCS series of speakers from L’Acoustics, a French manufacturer of loudspeakers, amplifiers and signal processing devices, include ARCS-Series Wide and Focus speakers for main left and right speakers; SB18i subwoofers; X8 balcony fill speakers and 5Xt speakers for under-balcony and front fill speakers. The system is driven via 4-channel LA4X amplifiers. Full specifications can be found at http://www.l-acoustics.com/products-catalog-75.html
The center will have a custom-built, moveable orchestra shell enclosure to create a fuller, more directed sound, said Hart. “The shell consists of overhead ceiling reflectors and rolling wall towers, which will provide an excellent acoustic environment for music performances,” he said. “The theater will also have an audio-visual system to support amplified music and musical theater as well as a projection system for media presentations, including movies.
“Further, the acoustics of the hall can be adjusted for different kinds of performances, like acoustic music, amplified media and spoken word. The mechanism for this adjustability is made up of four banks of curtains, located out of sight above the ceiling, which can be pulled open or drawn closed to change the sound of the hall,” Hart noted.
Lighting, Trap and Curtain
The stage’s production lighting system uses LED stage lighting fixtures, without dimmers, on 96 relay-controlled circuits, and is capable of millions of colors at the touch of a button. The system will be run from the Electronic Theater Control Ion Lighting Console with a 2 x 20 fader wing, said de Lucia. Each batten is capable of carrying up to 50 lights, with a light about every foot along the lighting racks.
The trap, mid-stage, “is 12 removable pieces of the stage floor, which opens access to a room below the stage,” said Hart. “There is no elevator or lift; it will be up to the technical directors to build whatever device makes sense for each production. It could be as simple as a stepladder, or something more elaborate, but the main thing is to enable this special, magical capability to emerge from or disappear into the floor.”
The main curtain of the auditorium, with fabric from one supplier, sewn by a second and hung by a third, from is made of red velour, sewn with fullness. Curtains with fullness have extra fabric across the width or height of the drape. This gives the drape a richer look while increasing depth of field, and the heavy curtain provides more light and sound absorption.
That stage curtain is only a few months from swinging open for the first time. Watch for further updates each month as the Rothschild Performing Arts Center nears completion in February.
Melody Huang, a teacher at the Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy, spent two weeks in mid-September at Harker as part of this year’s teacher exchange with the Chinese sister school. She began her first week at Harker by visiting several lower school English classes, as well as Jared Ramsey’s U.S. history class and Tobias Wade’s world geography class. At the middle school, she taught Mandarin to Xiuyu Gao’s students, and observed classes in English and expository writing.
The following week, Huang visited several classes at the upper school and taught in Shaun Jahshan’s Mandarin classes. She also observed several English classes and witnessed the fun of the upper school’s Spirit Week celebrations, including the raucous Homecoming Rally.
“I absolutely love the people here. I felt very welcomed since the first day I came,” Huang recalled. “Everyone wears a smile when I meet them in the hallway. And I remember there were couple of times people just came up to me and asked if I needed any help.”
During one weekend outing, Huang traveled to the Los Angeles area, where she visited beaches, museums and art galleries. She also toured the Bay Area, making sojourns to spots around San Jose (particularly its many confectioneries) and enjoying a day in San Francisco.
Upon arrival back home, Huang said she hopes to integrate some of what she learned at Harker into her work at SWFLA. “Bringing food and tea to the advisory session is definitely something I’m going to do when I get back!” she exclaimed.
Saturday night’s Homecoming celebration brought hundreds of members of the Harker community together to watch the soaring Harker Eagles, who had a 4-0 record going into the game, face off against the Rams of Rio Vista High School. Prior to the game, families socialized and enjoyed a variety of food options at the tailgate area, while performances by the lower school’s junior cheerleaders and the always-popular Eaglets got the crowd amped for the main event.
Rio Vista scored early to go up 7-0, but for the remainder of the half, it was all Eagles, who scored 23 unanswered points.
At halftime, the crowd enjoyed energizing performances by the Harker cheerleaders and the varsity dance troupe, and celebrated the crowning of this year’s Homecoming king and queen, seniors Peter Connors and Eleanor Xiao.
In the second half, Harker extended its lead by 10 points, which remained until Rio Vista responded in the fourth quarter with a last-second touchdown. Harker won with a final score of 33-13.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2017 issue of Harker Magazine.
Pat Walsh is a legend at Harker. The lower school math teacher has been at Harker since 1976, first as a summer camp coach, then dorm houseparent, and is retiring this year. He’s done it all, including driving a bus, coaching sports and organizing Harker’s Thanksgiving food drive for most of his career here. Students who went through his classroom remember him forever, and it’s clear from his interview that the passion he has for teaching, for his family, for volunteer work (and, oh yes, his obsession for the San Francisco Giants) is why his students love him so dearly. Walsh’s wife, Terry, whom he calls “the rock of our family,” worked at Harker for 35 years, and their three sons, Matt, Danny and Kevin, all attended Harker through grade 8.
What is something one of your parents said that you will never forget?
My mother was a teacher, and she told me a teacher’s No. 1 job is to be an advocate for all of their students. And in order to be an advocate, one has to focus on a kid’s good qualities … and every kid has plenty of good qualities.
What was one of your funniest classroom moments?
It’s embarrassing. Years ago while teaching third grade, I let my room mom, Melody Moyer, talk me into wearing a cupid outfit for the Halloween party. The kids were absolutely howling when they saw me. Now on Valentine’s Day, we play “Pin the Diaper on the Cupid.” It gets pretty silly, and they love it.
What is the one thing in the world you would fix if you could wave a magic wand?
Childhood poverty and lack of opportunity. It breaks my heart. This is something I emphasize with my kids, too. I believe that those of us who have been blessed with abundance have a duty to give back to those who are less fortunate.
Where in the world are you the happiest?
Family gatherings. I love to lay low and watch my sons talking with my friends and their other relatives. I learn a lot about them just by watching. All three of them are good men and interesting people.
What’s one of the favorite things you do in the classroom?
One of the things all of my students comment on when I see them years later is the “letter.” Each year I have taught, I have my kids write a letter to themselves. The first part of the letter is a summary of their year in grade 5. For the second part of the letter, I ask them to look into the future and predict how they think their lives will change over the course of the next three years. I mail these out the week they are wrapping up eighth grade.