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schools<br />
Lexington School<br />
Deanna Wilk<br />
The new school year at Lexington has<br />
begun. In her first Monday morning<br />
welcome to students <strong>and</strong> parents, new<br />
principal Lauren Honda coined the<br />
upcoming year, “the year of excellence.’’<br />
During the first week of school, students<br />
<strong>and</strong> teachers established classroom rules<br />
that would enable a respectful <strong>and</strong> caring<br />
environment so they can focus on doing<br />
their best.<br />
The parent volunteers of Project<br />
Cornerstone at Lex supported that same<br />
goal when visiting classrooms in September.<br />
They read the book <strong>Have</strong> You Filled a<br />
Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud, which<br />
focuses on caring. Project Cornerstone<br />
readers use stories, discussions, <strong>and</strong> activities<br />
to teach students <strong>and</strong> adults ways to build<br />
skills <strong>and</strong> confidence, develop empathy, <strong>and</strong><br />
acquire tools to deal with life’s challenges.<br />
In kindergarten, students received little<br />
tin buckets filled with soft, colorful balls, or<br />
“warm fuzzies.” The warm fuzzies are good<br />
feelings. When a person’s bucket is empty,<br />
that person feels sad, <strong>and</strong> when it is full<br />
of warm fuzzies, they feel happy. Students<br />
learned what they could do to fill buckets<br />
with kind words, smiles, <strong>and</strong> real listening.<br />
They also learned that everyone, even their<br />
parents, has an imaginary bucket. When<br />
someone is sad, there is a way to make that<br />
person feel better.<br />
Smarter Balanced Assessment System<br />
State Test Results Summary<br />
2014-2015<br />
English Met Math Met<br />
Statewide Average 44% 33%<br />
Santa Clara County Average 58% 52%<br />
Lakeside 83% 77%<br />
Loma Prieta 75% 65%<br />
Los Gatos Union<br />
(Including Lexington School)<br />
75% 70%<br />
For more complete results, see http://caaspp.cde.ca.gov.<br />
Older students role-played<br />
situations where someone<br />
dipped into one person’s<br />
bucket. Students learned why,<br />
how to stop it, <strong>and</strong> how to<br />
replace dipping with bucket<br />
filling. They practiced writing<br />
notes to one another using<br />
specific adjectives describing<br />
what makes the other person<br />
special.<br />
At the beginning of<br />
October, all students will<br />
gather to make a school-wide<br />
pledge to do their best to be<br />
bucket fillers, not dippers.<br />
Visit lexcornerstone.org to<br />
learn more about Project<br />
Cornerstone at Lex, <strong>and</strong> to see<br />
which books have been chosen<br />
for this year <strong>and</strong> the skills they<br />
build. Over 200 schools in<br />
the Silicon Valley partner with<br />
Project Cornerstone.<br />
Our first spirit day of the year was Crazy<br />
Hair Day. Students had a great time flexing<br />
their creative muscles <strong>and</strong> experimented<br />
with all kinds of materials to make their hair<br />
colorful <strong>and</strong> gravity-defying.<br />
They embraced their weekly running-club<br />
time with gusto, despite the heat. Parent<br />
volunteers, Anj Schuyler <strong>and</strong> Gretchen<br />
Hayes, run the program. Each student<br />
receives a necklace <strong>and</strong> gets foot beads based<br />
on the miles they log each week. This year,<br />
Lexington students are pretty sure they will<br />
cumulatively run far enough to make it<br />
(virtually) to Hawaii.<br />
Photo by Barbara<br />
Lougée<br />
page 26<br />
Mountain Network News<br />
october 2015
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