A Sneak Peak into Prep Week
After a restful summer break and a fun-filled summer camp, our wonderful staff is returning to wBees to prep for the 2022-2023 school year.
Prep week usually consists of staff meetings to discuss goals and ideas for the year, organize classrooms, and get into the school-year mindset. These days, you can find us brainstorming new works that are fresh and accessible to our new students and playing Tetris with our furniture to find the right configuration for the upcoming year. We’re constantly thinking about who our new students are and what will pique their interest on their first day of school. We’re also making comfort and ease a priority as we understand that change and new starts can be both exciting and tough, so we want to make sure our students feel welcome in their new space and can find comfort in their classroom.
As we prep the classroom, we’ll often crouch down to get a child’s view of the room, wondering how our space curation will look to the children. Perspective is an important part of preparing the classroom as we often see things from an adult perspective, both mentally and physically. Getting down to a child’s level and letting the child inside of us come out helps us to relate to the children and make informed choices of where to put works, how to organize shelves, and at what level to put name tags.
While much of the focus goes towards preparing the classrooms and the school, we also carve out special time to gather as a team. We’re lucky to be a small school which makes team bonding an intimate and close experience. We gather our individual interests and skills to incorporate them into our time as a team, such as group art making led by our Extended Day team, Flavia and Maíra. While discussing goals and plans, we’re fortunate to get feedback from our team members and incorporate diverse perspectives that come from everyone’s different backgrounds and viewpoints. Having a team that is so multifaceted and with such a variety of experiences is a wonderful asset and is something everyone benefits from, teachers and administration alike.
This year is particularly special for a few reasons. For the first time, we’re running as a hybrid private and public school, which opens us up to be more accessible to our direct community. We feel SO lucky to have the funding from the DOE to do this and to allow more families to join our school! This year also marks the closing of our Greenpoint location which means our Greenpoint teachers have merged and have come to teach at our one and only Ridgewood location! It’s exciting to be all together and start the year with teachers and staff that truly believe and embody what it means to be a wBees community member. Lastly, this year is so special because we’ve decided to rework our mission statement to better reflect who we are and what we do. We worked together to reflect on what we do each day, our goals for the school, and what we value. We’re elated to share it with our community!
We raise children who empathetically and confidently use their voice for the greater good of their classroom and wider community. We foster the development of the whole child through an emotionally responsive, nature-based Montessori curriculum that values play.
wBees Forest School is an inclusive and respectful community of passionate teachers, engaged children, and involved caregivers. We honor all life and aim to understand our part in this world.
We’re looking forward to class visits on September 6th! Wishing everyone a lovely long weekend!
