Plenty of Power at the Lower School

How many times last week did you ask (or were you asked), “Do you have power?” Of course, during THE weather, many of us existed without the aid of electrical energy coming from our walls. But the Lower School was full of power, whether it was streaming from our teachers, or making connections among students! 

As we all walked through the campus and saw classes uninterrupted by a small matter such as no light, I was “blown away” by the innovation and dedication of our faculty. One would automatically expect the Computer Lab, a place of total dependency on electricity, to be cancelled--but not so! Our talented instructor borrowed one of her 3rd and 4th grade online lessons and decided to try it with our 1st grade class. Instead of having a picture shown on the computer screen or SMART Board and students typing in MS Word, she had images mounted on cardboard to show the students. The exercise is meant to encourage small groups of children to create stories together to accompany the pictures. She and our librarian wrote as the groups dictated to them, using the children’s actual words.

When I read their stories, I had to be reminded several times that they were out of the mouths and minds of 6- and 7-year-olds. How could five or six children these ages create a story about “a lovely, young girl” who wrote a letter and “sealed it in a bottle with a bottle cap” as baby ducks and swans watched, just by looking at a picture of a river in the Florida Everglades?! Another collection of 1st graders looked at a picture of the New Mexico Badlands and then wrote about a rock person (“Bob”) who lived with his pet rock bear who protected him while scaring away a rock lion as Bob “camouflaged himself in the nearby rocks to be safe.” The vocabulary, thought process and collaboration of these young students were amazing in themselves; but to create like this under such unusual, distracting circumstances was nothing short of incredible. 

These are but a few examples of the electrifying learning that took place “the Day the Lights Went out in Georgia!” I have never been prouder or more impressed with our students and teachers as they all pooled their resources and ignited light bulbs of ideas across our campus. There was plenty of power at Darlington—actually, the best kind: brain-power!