Teacher Margaret's "View From My Window" - October 19th

As I write this, the Middle School students are away at Camp Dark Water. PreK students are embracing their inner Jackson Pollock as they splatter-paint the pumpkins they picked at Indian Acres Farm. Third Grade students are practicing their meteorological skills.

Los ninos de Segundo Grado leyeron una breve descripción del otoño en la clase de españo. Kindergarten and Third-graders collected some leaves and identified the colors of each leaf in Spanish before gluing them on paper (more photos here).  Kindergarten students also just finished writing narratives about something fun they did over the fall break. Fourth and Fifth-grade students are talking about all they learned about their watershed when they kayaked off Pyne Point Park. Preschool students, inspired by their firefighter visitors pretended to put out fires in their classrooms!

Last summer the faculty read “Ten Miles Around” by Andy Stanton-Henry from Friends Journal, April 2023. The author's central assertion is that we must focus our energy and effort on creating the world we seek from within our own community. At Westfield, the faculty and staff are working to hold space and time here for our students. We, from different backgrounds and experiences and faiths and cultures, are working to model and give children the experience and vision for what is possible when they respect and listen well to each other.

In Meeting for Worship this week, a second-grade student stood and declared, “Unity Day isn’t just for today, it is for every day. We need to always stand up for kindness.” In the weeks leading up to Unity Day, School Counselor, Donna Hughes-Gore and the rest of the faculty have been talking with students about bullying and the damage it does to individuals and communities. Students have been practicing speaking out against bullying and standing up for their schoolmates. Students are building the muscle memory, resilience, and confidence to act when they witness unkindness or injustice. They are learning to embrace in age-appropriate ways the muscularity and activism required of the Friends’ Testimony on Peace. As Bayard Rustin reminds us “There are three ways in which one can deal with an injustice. (a) One can accept it without protest. (b) One can seek to avoid it. (c) One can resist the injustice non-violently. To accept it is to perpetuate it.”

This month’s queries for Meeting for Worship come from the peace testimony: 

• Do I treat my friends as unique individuals, worthy of love and capable of great accomplishments?
• How do I witness to my beliefs in the world?
• Do I try to say and do what I believe in my heart is right even if my friends might make fun of me?
• Do I honor that of God in everyone I meet?