CLASS EMAILS
One of our most beloved traditions is the Carnation Ceremony. Each fall, the seniors welcome the Sunrise (TK and K) students to the school with a flower; in the spring, the Sunrise students wish the seniors well by offering them a flower.
We are excited to announce the date for the fall ceremony, which will take place in a special Quaker Meeting on Monday, Sept. 22 at 1:30 p.m. at New Garden Friends Meeting, located at 801 New Garden Road.
We hope you can be there for this special celebration. If you plan to join us, please RSVP by Thursday, Sept. 18 by sending an email to Head of Middle and Upper School Tanisha Jones at tanisha@ngfs.org. Please include the number in attendance (not including your student) when you send your RSVP.
Note about Dismissal: The Sunrise class will travel by small NGFS bus to the meetinghouse for this event. The ceremony will end by 2:30. Sunrise parents/guardians who attend are welcome to take their Sunriser home from the meetinghouse after the ceremony. Remaining students will be bused back to campus for regular dismissal and Extended Care.
WEEKLY NEWS
3/23-3/27
This week’s glimmer: In addition to the excitement of the Book Fair, it was so lovely to see our students and their grandfriends all together on Friday. We love having opportunities to show our Sunrise students that they are a part of a much bigger community, and inviting grandfriends into our space to make beautiful art with them is a great reminder.
Weekly academics: This week in literacy we learned the phoneme and grapheme s. S is a tricky letter to write and yet our friends are doing an amazing job with their letter formation. Students also continue to practice hearing and spelling the short e and i sounds. We read a story called Sam and Sid, after reading the story we answered questions about the story. TK has also enjoyed getting to join Kindergarten on Mondays to practice writing the new letters! TK continued our space exploration this week. We’ve learned all about how rockets work and we enjoyed spending the beginning of the week designing blueprints for rockets we built later in the week. Building rockets out of various sizes of blocks helped us review vocabulary of 3D shapes, hone our fine motor skills, and much more! We were so excited to get our new math books. Our friends continue to impress me every day with how quickly they are picking up writing addition sentences and how they are able to solve story problems. Our friends are using a variety of math tools to solve problems but they are especially proficient in using math drawings to represent story problems.
3/17-3/20/26
This week’s glimmer: Our students were thrilled to come back together after a week apart for Spring Break! We enjoyed sharing stories from our breaks and have been very excited to see our campus coming back to life for the beginning of Spring. Flowers are blooming, the grass is green again, and every day it’s getting a little warmer at play time. We are so excited to continue watching our beautiful campus come to life!
This week’s academics: TK began our inquiry into all things space this week. We gathered information we already know about space and are excited to begin digging into new space-related topics next week. We are excited to integrate various new 3-D shapes, vocabulary, and number stories into our space exploration.
2/23-2/27/26
Weekly glimmer: By far the highlight of this week was when our buddies came for a visit on Wednesday afternoon. In anticipation of their visit we drew them pictures and wrote them notes. We had beautiful weather Wednesday and were able to get outside and run around with our buddies. Our friends enjoyed playing tag and hide and seek. We also enjoyed walking around and talking and playing in the sandbox!
Weekly academics: This week in literacy we learned the sound for Nn. We are more than halfway through our phonemes and graphemes for the year. Next week since it is a short week we will be taking a few days to review before heading into spring break. We have gotten into a really good routine and our friends know what to expect. Soon after spring break we will start learning two letters a week. Meanwhile, TK math was all about measurements this week! We compared lengths and heights of classroom materials, foods, and even our own bodies! Our favorite measuring tool was our plastic chain links, which we used to measure the height of each TK student. We are also continuing to practice our observation, prediction, and recording skills while we measure. In kindergarten math, we continued exploring the relationship between parts and wholes. We looked at how a shape can be composed of various parts leading to different totals. We also pondered how the same shape could have varying totals and came to the conclusion that it was due to the varying sizes of the shapes.
2/16-2/20/26
Weekly glimmer: Celebrating the 100th day of school! It is hard to believe that we have been walking this journey together for a full 100 days; it seems like just yesterday we were welcoming everyone into our space for open house. We had time to reflect on our favorite memory from Sunrise thus far (we had an overwhelming excitement towards the Valentine’s party). We were able to make a snack that contained 100 items, and TK discussed what they would buy if they had $100. We also really enjoyed the visit from Marci and Jen who dressed up like they were 100 years old!
Weekly academics: In keeping with the 100th day theme, TK students enjoyed talking and learning all about the number 100 this week. We practiced different ways to build 100, made structures using 100 blocks, and collected data about what we would like to do if we had $100 and when we turn 100 years old. In Kindergarten math we are well on our way to doing addition and subtraction. We have introduced the number bond as a tool to help us organize our information. We have spent most of our week identifying the parts and the whole of a collection of objects. We have also continued to reinforce math language in identifying how we have sorted a collection as well as using complete sentences when answering problems.
This week in literacy we learned the sound for Ff. In the past week it has been really amazing to watch this group of kiddos find their confidence and their fluency when it comes to dictation. We have noticed a shift in how students are able to spell words with more ease and are taking pride in doing their best work. We will continue to work on this skill through the end of the year as well as continue to practice writing sentences. This is still more of a challenge but this group is rising to the occasion!
2/9-2/13/26
This week’s glimmer: The beautiful weather was enjoyed by all this week. We were so excited to get outside and play on the playground. We observed the disappearing snow and had fun in the puddles it left behind. We were also delighted by the fact that we now have enough kindness links for it to drape over the door. We have enjoyed recognizing our peers for the kind things they do as well as taking pride in our own actions when someone else notices how we are helping and working together as a community.
This week's academics: Literacy-This week in literacy we learned the sound for Rr. R is a tricky sound and is made with rounded lips and is the sound you hear at the beginning of the word rat. It is not the sound that you hear at the end of the word badger. We read the book Rabbits Snow Dance, which many of our friends were familiar with. During the read aloud we had time to reflect on rabbits behavior and how he was not thinking about the community when he decided to make it snow. We also talked about how we can all slow down and pay more attention to what is happening around us.
K Math: We continued learning about parts and wholes this week in math. We were able to decompose shapes and then use them to build a new whole. We had a chance to begin exploring story problems and practiced identifying the parts in a story and then identifying the whole or total sum of the parts in a story. Our friends really enjoyed being the teacher and modeling how they solved a variety of problems this week.
Unit Study- This week in unit study we continued our exploration of folktales. We read the story of The Wolf and the 7 Kids and The Bremen Town Musicians. We are getting really good at making connections within texts and using new vocabulary and applying it in different settings.