Java, Jokes and Jazz

Java, Jokes and Jazz

Middle schoolers will host their first coffee house on Thursday, February 23. The event will be after school in the library. Middle school students can perform art, music, comedy, or poetry. The event will be organized by sixth grade English teacher Ms. Bloomfield, and middle school special education teachers Ms. Lee-Bey and Ms. Whitfield.  Students will take leadership roles from organizing food and performance schedules to posters promoting the event. In the upper school, students have participated in semi-annual performances of arts afternoons called “The Hook.” 

A View From Afar

A View From Afar

Ms. Yahui Huang, a Fulbright scholar and high school English teacher from Taiwan, visited all Chinese classes last week to discuss life and culture in Taiwan. Ms. Huang is currently serving as a Foreign Language Teaching Assistant for Mandarin classes at Catholic University. She responded to a number of questions that students had prepared in advance, ranging from inquiries about Taiwanese culture and politics to questions about how Ms. Huang and her friends view President Trump and the potential changes in relationships between China and the US.

Hidden Figures Now Visible

Hidden Figures Now Visible

This week tenth graders took a field trip to see the movie “Hidden Figures,” a movie about female African-American mathematicians at NASA. The tenth grade curriculum includes several units on civil rights and European history. In past years, tenth graders have also visited spots like the Holocaust Museum. The movie focuses on how Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson, helped calculate the flight trajectories for Project Mercury and other NASA missions.

Plenty of Performance Possibilities

Plenty of Performance Possibilities

Fifth graders performed rewritten fairytales Wednesday afternoon in their theater classes. The plays, directed by fifth and sixth grade theatre teacher Mr. Baldwin, featured comic retellings of classic stories, with a strong emphasis on irony. This week’s performance follows the seventh and eighth grade performance of “Diary of Anne Frank,” and “Fools,” directed by seventh and eighth grade theatre teacher Mr. Birkenhead. In February, Ms. Kolb’s eighth grade theatre class will perform Macbeth. The play will be directed by students in the class and will be performed both at Washington Latin and at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre.

It’s Cool to Bee Cool

It’s Cool to Bee Cool

Middle schoolers participated in our school’s Spelling Bee this past Tuesday. Seventh grader Ava Pugh earned a first place spot in the bee, followed by sixth grader Adelaide Pfeuffer, and eighth grader Robbie Mirabello. Sixth grader Audrey Kim earned a spot as the alternate.  This crew will take their phonemic awareness to the cluster bee, competing with several of other Washington, D.C. schools and then, if successful will move on to the Citywide Bee.  Last year Mirabello came in seventh place for the citywide bee and current freshman Perrin Brady came in second for the citywide bee.