A Day On, Not Off...Wood Acres Day of TLC- Teaching, Learning, Caring!

Monday, January 16 marked the Wood Acres Day of Service. The whole campus came together to begin this “day on” at a Rally ‘round the Flag. Special visitors at the Rally were Sandy Welfare, Executive Director of Cool Girls of Georgia, Norman Davis, one of Atlanta’s first black police officers and father of one of our Early School teachers, Pearline Davis, Director of Spellman College, retired and mother of our teacher, and Dr. Terrence Roberts, member of the Little Rock Nine and international consultant. Wood Acres’ own music teacher, Brishelle Miller, gave a rousing performance of Lift Every Voice.

 
Members of the Glee Club gave an outstanding rendition of Bruno Mars’ hit song Just the Way You Are.

 
Every student, from the Twos through Eighth Grade, participated in creating links of love and kindness that encircled the entire quad. On the paper links, all 5,000 0f them, were messages of service and dreams and wishes for our world. What an awesome sight! 

 
Several guest speakers and visitors roamed the Woods on this day honoring Dr. King. The Upper School had the pleasure of hearing from Justice Harold Melton from the Georgia Supreme Court. Dr. Terrence Roberts spoke to Upper School students encouraging them to embrace a life of learning and caring. Family members of students also came to share their personal stories and give students a firsthand account of what life was like during the time of Dr. King.    

 
Projects on this Day of Service included raising funds for a Heifer International Animal Ark, Better World Book Drive, canned food drive for MUST Ministries, clipping coupons, Bike-a-Thon for Smile Train, compiling birthday bags, Mittens for Moms for MUST Ministries, compiling “Get Ready for School” bags for a local school, donating breakfast foods and a complete non-perishable meal to MUST Ministries, creating file folder literacy games to donate to a local school, compiling dinner bags to go to the Marietta Soup Kitchen, authoring ABC books for area children, clothing drive for Cool Girls organization and the Atlanta Women’s Shelter, touring Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen and MUST Ministries Distribution Center, and donating books to children of Joplin, Mississippi.    

 
What a fabulous day “ON!”    

What does a smaller class size mean for my student?

The US Department of Education has found considerable findings in the relationship between a lower student/teacher ratio and student success. Read on to see why Wood Acres’ smaller-than-average class size plays an important role in your student’s future.

In 1997, Wenglinsky published research findings concerning the relationship between class size and student achievement based on his analysis of data drawn from three national level databases. The study was designed to investigate the relationship between spending in education and student performance, and combined data from three different databases generated by the National Center for Education Statistics. Based on an analysis of data on fourth-graders in 203 districts and eighth-graders in 182 school districts from across the United States, Wenglinsky found that class size served as an important link between school education spending and student mathematics achievement at both the fourth- and the eighth-grade levels, although in different ways:

• At the fourth-grade level, lower student/teacher ratios are positively related to higher mathematics achievement.
• At the eighth-grade level, lower student/teacher ratios improve the school social environment, which in turn leads to higher achievement.

Using data from more than 800 Texas districts containing more than 2.4 million students, Ferguson found significant relationships among teacher quality, class size, and student achievement. For first through seventh grades, using student/teacher ratio as a measure of class size, Ferguson found that district student achievement fell as the student/teacher ratio increased for every student above an 18 to 1 ratio.

In 1978, Smith and Glass published the results of 77 empirical studies pertaining to the relationship between class size and achievement, and soon followed it with a second meta-analysis analyzing the relationship between class size and other outcomes. Overall, they found that small classes were associated with higher achievement at all grade levels, especially if students were in the small classes for more than 100 hours, and if student assignment was carefully controlled. They found that the major benefits of reducing class size occurred where the number of students in the class was fewer than 20. In their second study, they concluded that small classes were superior in terms of students’ reactions, teacher morale, and the quality of the instructional environment.

This is a mere sample of the research that has been conducted. Please visit the US Department of Education’s website to read the article in its entirety.

Everyone Can be Great because Everyone Can Serve

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is known for his outstanding work in the civil rights movement, but his later years were filled with a desire to encourage participation in service learning. When it comes to service to others, the words of the late Dr. King ring loud and clear-“Everybody can be great because everyone can serve.” As the 26th anniversary of the King Day of Service approaches, plans are well underway to make service learning an enduring component of a Wood Acres education.

Wood Acres has always been an altruistic school and quietly participated in charitable projects such as the Smile Train, St. Jude’s Hospital, Jump Rope for Heart, MUST Ministries, UNICEF, and Cool Girls. This year, the school will “raise the bar” by developing a template for service learning that begins with our two year old students and grows in scope through 8th grade. To help us focus our efforts and learning, Wood Acres will choose an area of philanthropy each year that resonates with our school community. Our focus this year is “Feeding Young Minds & Bodies: Literacy and Childhood Hunger.”

What have we done so far? There has been conversation, discussion, research and reading about service learning as well as literacy and childhood hunger. We have learned much and want to tackle it all! But we also have learned that to sustain service learning and make it contextual, experiential, and cross-disciplinary for our students, planning and revising those plans will be one of the driving forces of this first year. The great thing we have discovered is that small steps are celebrated, small projects grow, and dreams become school-wide realities very quickly when one puts both head and heart into the programming.

Coretta Scott King said, “The greatest birthday gift my husband could receive is if people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds celebrated the holiday by performing individual acts of kindness through service to others.” We plan to do just that! Please join us on January 16th for a day of service on the Wood Acres campus as we learn and grow to become great. 

Judy Thigpen
Head of School