Blog

In the Avenues Small World program for 2- and 3-year-old students, the children take partner walks with a teacher and one peer in the neighborhood as part of our regular spring curriculum. These walks encourage curiosity, friendship and adventure!

We embarked on a months-long process to sort through every education app in our arsenal and categorize them.

As part of of their “City Life” topic, students in the Spanish 8D class worked on a hands-on project, “My City Life.” In collaboration with the iLab, students were to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces, paying particular attention to physical, cultural and social identities.

As the children are becoming more representational in their drawings, we decided that it would be a excellent opportunity for them to create self portraits. These portraits were also a great way to review and teach new Chinese words related to the face while introducing a new way to do art.

This year, student were tasked with created their own version of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History project, in which Dr. Zinn planned events with famous actors performing primary documents written by the kinds of ordinary people that have acted throughout history to organize movements for greater liberty, equality and democracy. 

In the workshop course Mahjong Master, my students had the opportunity to learn Chinese Mahjong, a game deeply ingrained in Asian culture and popular around the world.

Throughout the year, the pre-K Cats and Rabbits learned about caring for books. We practiced skills like turning one page at a time. We also worked on increasing our self-awareness of who we are as readers.

The American Library Association recently released their list of the top 10 books that were challenged in 2017 – and I must admit, a lot of those that made the list are some books I really enjoyed. More importantly, many of the books that made those lists are incredibly popular with our students.

Detailed description is one of the paramount skills in foundational Chinese. The more advanced a student becomes in their language facility, the more accurate and nuanced the description becomes.

On Tuesday, June 5, the class of 2018 graduated from Avenues New York. They're moving on to great things, and we couldn't be happier for them.