Junior Signature Programs

DSC_4224As members of the Junior Division, students can look forward to participation in many of our signature programs.

Junior Play: Each spring, students in the Junior Division rehearse, produce, and perform a play for our community. Every student in the division is involved in different aspects of the production. It is an exciting, unifying, challenging, and highly anticipated event. This is the division’s largest community service project of the year, and the proceeds are used to fund other projects.

Girls’ Club: Starting in third grade, girls are invited to participate in Girls’ Club. Designed to foster communication, community, leadership skills, and positive self-image, Girls’ Club is an opportunity to meet socially and participate in fun activities. The girls meet with other members of their grade for lunch-time discussions with teachers. Girls in grades 3 through 8 are invited to attend special events after school. What happens at Girls’ Club stays at Girls’ Club, so you’ll just have to wait until you’re a Junior to come see what it’s all about!

Field Trips: Academics in the Junior Division are taught on a three-year rotating cycle. As such, there are certain regular, thematic trips that await members of the Junior Division. We take full advantage of the Boston area’s rich historical tradition and university culture. Some regularly scheduled field trips include, but are not limited to:

    • Battle Road – The site of the Battles of Lexington and Concord
    • Plimoth Plantation – The site of the first permanent English settlement in New England
    • Higgins Armory Museum – One of the premier collections of medieval art and weaponry on the Eastern seaboard
    • Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) Collections of Egyptian, Mayan, and Classical Art
    • Lowell Mills – Birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution
    • Harvard University Peabody Museum – Geological Collections and Activities
    • MIT Museum – Various Science and Engineering topics

Core Tour: The Core Tour is a chance for parents to come to school to experience their child’s schedule. They are able to participate in classes for Humanities, Math, and Science. Parents might see a science experiment, hear the recitation of medieval monologues, or even participate in a mock election! Core Tour is an opportunity for teachers and students to share the amazing learning that occurs in the classrooms daily with the community at large. Junior students relish having the opportunity for their parents to witness their academic lives at Sage firsthand!

Fifth Grade Fridays: Childhood is often considered a simple, trouble-free time. As adults, it can be easy to see the relative lack of responsibilities that kids shoulder and misunderstand the significance and seriousness of the processes young people go through as they mature. It is essential to remember, when working with children of any age, the way in which young people are grappling with their own identities on a daily basis. Childhood can be an extremely challenging time because young people are learning who they are and determining who they want to be, while processing and attempting to understand how to define their personalities, values, and identities. They crave guidance from the trusted adults in their lives through discussions and lessons designed to help young people grow into the adults they hope to become.

The transition from the Junior Division to the Middle School is loaded with potential for this kind of work. We focus on the changes students are working through and listen closely when students trust us enough to share their thoughts and feelings. The purpose of Fifth Grade Fridays is to provide a structure for these discussions. Showing students that this work is essential enough to build time and space for it into our schedules reassures them that they are understood, appreciated, and valued as complex, changing, and thoughtful young people.

At least once a week, all fifth-grade students meet together in a classroom for about thirty minutes. Although the class is called Fifth Grade Friday, we often meet on Thursday – the kind of joke perfectly suited to 10 and 11-year olds. The class is led by teachers who work with the group during the regular academic day. Individual activities are developed and administered to fit in with the natural and organic thoughts and processes that students are facing at the time. The facilitators pay close attention to the students’ goals, development, interactions, and struggles in order to identify the appropriate timing for different activities during the course. While this class is led by teachers, it is most impactful because it is driven by the students’ needs, and it addresses objectives as they arise for the students as individuals and as a class.