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Student & Family Information
Index
What to Do to Get Ready to Begin School
For Us
For Your Student
Family Book
Format of first two pages
Ready
by the first day of school
For the State
For Your Family
What to Bring To
School
What to Wear To
School
Sunscreen
Labelled
All weather clothing
Practical, comfortable, free range of motion
To get dirty
Closed shoes
Hats
Capes and costumes
Generic, Please
Facility and volunteer committee reports
Building
Painting
Gardening
Sewing
Office Parties
Web Committee
Playground Plan
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What to Do to Get Ready To Begin School:
FOR US,
Your child must have independent toilet skills and
be developmentally ready for school.
Our idea of school readiness does not concern
alphabets or math facts, but looks to a child's emotional and conceptual readiness for the
independence and social connections of school.
You must turn in:
The registration form,
The permission
form for field days at the park, and
The release for use of student images.
We will provide the permission form and release at
the August 24 parent meeting, and answer questions if needed. Our approach is dependent on
taking and using lots of pictures of students and their work, and we will be walking to
the park every week. You will have a chance to decline, but we will need you to sign and
return the forms one way or another.
FOR YOUR CHILD,
Family Book
For each child starting this Fall, we have
prepared a notebook to be used by your child as a Family Book. We distributed these to
families that attended last weekend's picnic, and have the rest at school available for
pick up. Detailed instructions are inside.
The Family Books contain pages with blank
places for pictures and information about your child and your family. We ask that they be
assembled as a family project, involving your child in the selection of pictures and
stories. These will be used by the children as a way of feeling connected to home while at
school, and also to support their own storytelling about themselves. The Family Books are
surprisingly powerful learning and social tools, and we will use them extensively at the
beginning of the year.
Ready by the first day of school. The Family Books will be used very heavily during the first days and weeks
of school, and we do not want anyone to feel left out. It really isn't something we can do for them. They are very simple, and
we really do ask that you have them ready when the students first arrive at school on
Sept. 9.
FOR THE STATE,
Your child must:
Be the Minimum Legal Age, and reach their 5th Birthday by December 2, 2010
Submit Documentation of required:
Vaccinations )
Dental Exam ) Or Waiver
Physical Exam)
We have distributed the forms to track the
legally required vaccinations and examinations, and will send them out to new families as
they register. There is also a legal waiver that parents may sign to opt out of those
requirements. We will need either the forms or the waiver for your child to start school.
Home Language Survey – have also been distributed and must be returned before student
starts school.
IEP or 504 Plans if applicable. If your child already has an Individual Education Plan for speech or
special education, or a §504 Disability Plan, those plans must be submitted to the school
to complete your registration and allow uninterrupted services.
Original Birth Certificate/Abtract of Live Birth
Social Security Number
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How Can you Prepare Your Child for School?
Can-do self-reliance - This is a broad attitude we want to encourage at all times,
particularly with reference to the new challenges of starting school.
Practice with shoes and clothing. Students must be able to fasten their own clothing and shoes, their
fingers are little, and it doesn't come easily. Practice beforehand will polish those
skills and the self-confidence to feel good about their own abilities.
Having your child pack
their backpack, and carrying it themselves, builds
familiarity and helps them be aware of their needs. It helps keep track of personal things
and means fewer lost items.
How Can you Prepare
Yourselves for Your Child Beginning School?
What can you do as a family to prepare for the new
routines and challenges of school life?
A) Begin
conversations about what it will be like to go to school- How do you feel?
- Talk about what the first day will feel like,
- How will we say goodbye?
- Create your family's goodbye ritual.
- Have your child involved in this discussion
B) What do drop
offs look like (so that you can paint this picture for your child)?
Timing and where to meet (with explanations of
expectations)
7:30 a.m. Campus opens for supervised student
drop off in yard.
7:30-8:00 a.m. - Classrooms available for children
to show their families their work and ideas
8-8:15 children meet on the yard and have their
goodbyes with their family
8:15 children go in with their teachers (school is
8:15-2:00)
C) You are
preparing your child, but also remember your own feelings and prepare yourself similarly: You
will be having emotions too, and what does this mean for your child's goodbye?
By the way, we will have a reception on the
morning of the first day of school for our parents once the kids have marched away from
you into class.
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What to
Bring To School:
Your child will not need to come to
school with supplies like paper, pencils or notebooks.
All they will need is:
T o arrive for school wearing sunscreen for the day and carrying,
A backpack big enough for a full sized sheet of paper. Be sure it fits the child
properly and that they can operate its fasteners and closures, etc. In the backpack should
be:
A change of clothes in a ziplock
baggie
A reusable water bottle
A healthy lunch that can store
and serve at room temperature...
...ideally in re-usable packing
Ideally, lunches should be packed in
re-usable containers as we introduce the general idea of waste reduction. Again, the
children need to be able to open and close the containers themselves. The reusable packing
will be cleaned and returned to the child's backpack every day. If a child brings lunch in
a brown paper bag and disposable packaging, it will be refolded and returned to the
backpack to go home. You can then re-use or discard it, but your child will have
participated in the clean up and given you the option. Beyond the specifically green
agenda, there is an important learning piece in this for the children as they develop
awareness and good habits of community and personal responsibility. Clean up will be a
very big part of our school culture.
Wish List:
While we will provide students with the
materials and supplies they will need for their work, we are very grateful for donations
of the materials and supplies we will use. We have been preparing a kind of wish list to
publish to our community, just in case someone wants to donate any of the items we are
looking for. At this moment, however, that list is changing day to day as surprising
things are donated or otherwise appear. We will continue to update the list, however, and
we will publish it here on our website in a format that tracks donations as they are made.
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What to
Wear to School:
The idea of "school clothes" involves
both practical and instructional aspects.
Labeled, discretely
Please mark your child's belongings with their
name to aid them in keeping track. But mark the child's name in a discreet place not
visible to passers-by who don't need to know your child's name.
All weather clothing, jacket
We are going to be outside for parts of every
day, rain and shine, to experience the natural world. San Diego's mild weather does
include some wet and cold days, and children should dress appropriately. Children will
have a change of clean, dry clothes available as needed, but the first line of defense is
to stay warm and dry.
To Get Dirty
Please expect your child to spend time in the
messy outdoors every day, and also indoors every day in contact with messy materials.
Please expect them to get their school clothes messy, and please expect washable paints
not to be all that washable after all.
Comfortable and practical for physical activity
Xara learning is physical and active, both
outdoors and indoors. Garden, yoga, dance, language, social studies, mathematics and
social skills are all learned through activity, and a full range of comfortable movement
is very important.
Footwear:
Sturdy, closed toe shoes. We know some children are very agile and comfortable in sandals. But we
will be outdoors and scrambling about for parts of every day, and children will need
closed shoes to support and protect their feet.
They can fasten themselves. We will also be indoors and quiet for parts of every day, and children
will have the chance to take off their shoes, but they must be able to put them back on
again. This is not about our unwillingness to strap or tie shoes, it is about creating the
child's expectation of self-sufficiency. Choose shoes your child can actually manage
alone. By the same token, please don't double knot their shoes if they wear laces.
Hats: The sun is harsh, young skin is tender, shady hats help.
Capes and Costumes:
At every turn, we want to encourage
children's experience and expression of their own individual identities. This includes
permitting the students to wear clothing that projects their own sense of make believe,
including capes, crowns, etc. The classroom culture will be safe and supportive for
children inclined to costumes, and just as safe and supportive for others who aren't. With
that said, however, we aren't talking about store-bought, Party City costumes, and we ask
you to read on to the "Generic, Please" section for more on this subject.
Generic, Please
We are asking that Xara Garden School clothes be
as generally generic as possible.
There are a variety of issues involved in this,
and plenty of exceptions. The clothing we are talking about is only school clothing, and
we aren't suggesting anything about what children should wear when they are not at school.
This topic deserves some explanation, partly because it is unusual and partly because the
associated ideas are so important.
Neutral environment
A deliberate part of our educational approach
involves creating a visually subdued and neutral environment in the classrooms. This
aligns the visual focus of the room with the functional focus of the room – which is
the students themselves and their work. Everything in that environment is hand picked for
particular purposes, and they are presented as needed. This contrasts with classrooms
filled with strong primary color and hodgepodge decorations everywhere. Our preference for
generic clothing over clothes and items with graphics is part of this same idea.
Accessories
Just as mimes wear black to provide the most
adaptable image upon which to project imagination, generic clothing makes it easier for a
child to project themselves into other times, places, and lives as they create costume
accessories and other things to illustrate their learning.
Graphics
Adding graphics to one's clothing or belongings is
one way to try to experience and express one's own identity.
If a child wanted to add their own graphics to their
clothing or backpack or whatever, we would consider that more valuable than the preference
for plain generics – because it was their own expression and work. This is different
than wearing graphics that were professionally finished and sold by someone else.
Then, there are lots of different kinds of graphics,
and they involve different concerns. If a family went on a rafting trip and a child wanted
to wear a souvenir shirt, that would be a projection of their own life story and
adventure, and it would be welcome as a sharing of self. This is a deeper reflection of
the child's own self than wearing a shirt with a cool dragon because the child thinks
dragons are cool.
Further, some graphics are concerned with marketing
commercial products, and involve other issues of advertising in the classroom. Still
further, a lot of kids' clothing promotes commercial characters that are marketed to the
children themselves, and this involves the further concern about marketing to children
when they are young, impressionable and impulsive. Some schools go to uniforms just to
avoid "gotta-have-it" fashion issues, and we want to support families in
avoiding an arms race over the latest styles or brands.
At the farthest end of the range are graphics that
are violent, sexual, insulting, negative, promote drinking, or are otherwise not
appropriate for school. Graphics of this kind are actually forbidden by school rule. All
the rest is preference and school culture.
Hopefully, the reader will appreciate that we are
describing a range of acceptable clothing, as well as preferences within that range. Most
preferred are plain generic items without graphics. Next are non-promotional graphics,
followed by promotional graphics, with commercial characters and children's advertising
coming in last.
Beyond that,
violent and negative messages and images are
actually forbidden.
Exceptions and Reasonableness
We want to be clear that the Generic, Please
preference is not intended as an incoming expectation at the start of school. We don't
want or expect you to buy all new wardrobes. Rather, we are holding this out as a star for
us to steer by as we move forward. It is a goal and an ideal, not a statute.
A mom said her daughter had a two year old Hannah
Montana backpack that was like-new and was going to work for Kindergarten. Should she
replace it or paint out Hannah's face or something? No no, replacing a good item with a
new item is wasteful, and we really hate waste. All of this is leavened with
reasonableness and your good judgment, and the rules are situational.
Suppose a boy just really really wants to wear his
shirt with Spiderman on the front every day this week. This indicates that there is
something about Spiderman that the child is trying to work out – or rather something
about himself he is working out and using Spiderman as a tool. You could just say,
"No, it's not allowed," but that would miss the chance to really talk to the boy
and understand what learning he is working through. In that situation, wearing the shirt
opens a teachable moment, and that is what we are all here for.
And back to those Party City costumes... You can now
see why commercial Halloween costumes are not within the spirit of what we mean when we
talk about capes and crowns and making one's own costumed identity. When one puts on a
Spiderman costume, all the character attributes and imaginative work of creation are all
done for you. We feel it is much better and more valuable to be put to the task of
inventing what is all your own.
And this does bear mention. We have no fight with
Disney Corp. or anyone else trying to make an honest buck. There is nothing wrong with a
child who is excited by Hannah Montana or Transformers. Think of how hard they work to
excite children about those things. We aren't bucking capitalism or commercial art. What
we are trying to do is put and keep the focus on the child's own imagination and
individuality.
We are working very carefully to create an optimal
learning environment, and your children will be elements in that environment. We ask you
to support us in that effort.
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Facility
and Committee Reports
We secured our facilities in a church building
at the beginning of August and we are marshaling community help to spruce things up for
the beginning of school. We have divided volunteer labor into several committees under
different chairs, and they are all making their own progress. These include:
Building Committee: Is creating classroom furniture, constructing a wall, and opening walls
in our space. We will also be adding a gate between the buildings to direct foot traffic
through the reception area and separate student areas.
Painting Committee: A commercial painting contractor who specializes in low VOC and
environmentally friendly paint is donating the crew to paint our classrooms and the
restrooms. Our own crew of volunteer painters have been spared the overhead work, but we
do have items of unfinished furniture that need to be "painted" with varnish.
Gardening Committee: We have met with our framing consultant and developed a plan to develop
the garden in stages, so there are things for the students to do when school starts, and
there is lots more to do once we are open.
The first step will took place last Saturday, Aug.
15, as we removed and bagged existing planter material and spaded the beds to prepare
them.
THIS Saturday we will come back with compost and the
good, symbiotic fungal mycellia to work into the beds. We will also chip the material we
remove this weekend and start our composting project. The work last weekend was not be
much fun for kids, but the activity on the 22nd will be up their alley.
Sewing Committee: A group of volunteers have begun hemming fabric remnants the children
will use in their centers and work looms ahead making pillow covers, etc.
Office Parties: A number of people have volunteered to help stuff envelopes and generally
help with administrative tasks as needed. We are very very grateful, and have long
memories. So far, however, we have not had projects of this kind to ask of everyone, but
we want you to know we will find important things to do as we go.
Web Committee: A group of people have offered to help me retool and upgrade our website.
Unlike the Office Parties, there is work that could be done here, but it depends on me
getting things organized to start. I will be contacting the members of that committee with
an update and to sort everyone's skills.
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Playground
Plan:
Last but not least, we wanted to share some news
about our playground plan. We have ideas for creating a lovely playground at the school,
with hanging gardens and slides built into rolling hills of grass.
A community organization, Burners Without Borders, is offering to
make all this come true. BWB is a spin-off project by members of the Burning Man community
to provide disaster relief around the world, and have been rebuilding disaster areas since
Katrina. San Diego is a hotbed of fundraising for the organization, and they would like to
give back by helping us build our playground. They have already pledged a cash donation
that doubled our budget and will promote donations to our cause through their network.
They're pretty good with power tools too.
Our plan is to create safe enclosure and good
activities by the start of school, and then to engage the students in the planning and
execution of a barn-raising installation project, probably in October. This would give
time to maximally involve the community, gather donations, and create the best possible
imagination-scape for the children.
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2010-2011 Xara
Garden School Student Registration Form
Executive Director,
Mark Hinkley
619.255.9580 Fax: 619.255.3286 welcome@xaraschools.org
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