What We're Reading - May 2021

How can it already be May?! It seems like just yesterday we were all eagerly welcoming the new school year, and now we are just a month away from the end of the year. We hope you are enjoying reading our 8th Grade “Meet Us Monday” interviews as they reflect on their time at ILS as well as look ahead to high school. Check back each week as we share more of these and celebrate our ILS Class of 2021!

As we count down to the end of the year, we are looking forward to the return of many ILS favorite traditions. We join with our Upper School students in their excitement to be returning to camps this year! Jr. Kindergarten will be enjoying their Medieval Feast, while Upper School students will be competing in their annual Oration Showcase. We will all be enjoying the return of Field Day and to celebrating our graduating class with their Graduation Vespers Service.

Please enjoy the May edition of our "What we're reading..." Blog. As always, we hope that you enjoy this variety of articles that we have found to be inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing, and that these pieces continue to help to shape ongoing conversations. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!

Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

What We're Reading - March 2021

We have made it though a snowy February, and marked the beginning of Lent. It was a joy to have the opportunity to meet so many prospective ILS families during the admissions process, which included parent meetings and student assessments throughout the month. As parents ask about the nature of the ILS community, it has been a joy to share with them the numerous blessings of our life together. We are reminded daily of your strong commitment to our mission in the ways you help your children with their homework, engage and encourage teachers, and participate in the daily rhythms of the school, even if remotely. You pray for one another. You show love to your child's classmates and ask how to best care for staff and fellow families. You model Christian friendship and forgiveness. We are excited to welcome new families to our ILS community for the 2021-22 school year!

In February, we also enjoyed welcoming Lower School families virtually for our 2nd Trimester Lower School Showcase. As we kick off March, we look forward to meeting with parents for our Parent Teacher Conferences and beginning our final trimester of the school year. It is hard to believe we’re already at this point in the year! We are also all looking forward to Spring Break in just a few weeks, and some time to rest and recharge for the final months of the school year.

Please enjoy the March edition of our "What we're reading..." Blog. As always, we hope that you enjoy this variety of articles that we have found to be inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing, and that these pieces continue to help to shape ongoing conversations. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!

Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

What We're Reading - February 2021

January saw the return of some favorite ILS annual traditions as we concluded the month with our celebration of National Lutheran Schools Week alongside more than 1900 other LCMS schools from across the country. We loved seeing students and teaches participating in fun competitions, practicing recitations, decorating, sharing fun costumes, and more.

It was a delight to end the week with our 7th Annual ILS Talent Show! Held virtually for the first time, we enjoyed being able to welcome grandparents and friends from across the country to join us for a fun and engaging evening celebrating the many talents within our ILS community.

We were also honored to participate in an all-day virtual hymn sing organized by Our Savior Lutheran School in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As part of their effort to sing a stanza from each of the 635 hymns in the Lutheran Service Book, Our Savior Lutheran School invited musical Lutherans from around the country, including Immanuel, to participate. ILS Music Teacher, Mrs. Marie Greenway, directed our 4th grade students in beautifully singing two hymns.

As we kick off February with a snowy start, please enjoy the latest edition of our "What we're reading..." Blog. As always, we hope that you enjoy this variety of articles that we have found to be inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing, and that these pieces continue to help to shape ongoing conversations. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!

Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

What We're Reading - January 2021

Happy New Year!

As we kick off the new year, we have compiled a new edition of our "What we're reading..." Blog. As always, we hope that you enjoy this variety of articles that we have found to be inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing, and that these pieces continue to help to shape ongoing conversations. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!

Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

Classical Education: A Literary Education

Classical education is often described from its ends. Many proponents of classical education discuss these goals in terms of the "transcendentals": truth, goodness, and beauty. While these discussions, because they are often attended by certain Aristolelian notions about existence and knowledge, are frequently problematic from the point of view of Lutheran theology, I would like to set these aside for now (although this is a subject worthy of future discussion) and discuss classical education from another perspective: its means. For all of the West's recorded history, the means of education in the liberal arts, with the exception of music and gymnastics which require the practice of non-discursive skills, has been orality and literacy. That is to say that students have learned via talking, listening, reading, and writing; not all that different from our three R's: reading, writing, and arithmetic. What makes education "classical" is its relationship to the Classics, those written works deemed worthy of handing over from generation to generation. Reading, therefore, is a most indispensable means, a sine qua non, for a classical education. A classical education is by definition a literary education.

What We're Reading - December 2020

Happy New (Church) Year! Although November 30th marked the first day of Trimester 2, Sunday, November 29, marked a more important day in our life together at Immanuel. The Season of Advent, meaning "coming" in Latin, is upon us. Advent wreaths can be found in each classroom helping mark this time of waiting to celebrate the birth of Christ, and our waiting for the final coming of our Jesus, who will bring us into His kingdom.

Integral to the life of Immanuel students is the annual cycle of remembering events in the life of Jesus and marking time with unique celebrations. We give thanks for these intentional rhythms and the opportunity to be united with Christians from times past and in the future. Be sure to ask your child about our Advent traditions and look for a small book that came home today (one per family) called, A Simple Explanation of the Church Year. Here you will find short descriptions of major seasons and festivals of the Church Year along with suggestions for incorporating Church Year traditions into your family life.

If you're looking for Advent resources, these may be helpful:

The Family Read-Aloud Advent Calendar

Latin Advent Calendar

November was a busy time, and we are thankful for the many ways our community showed love and service towards our neighbor. As we expanded our traditional “Day of Service” to a month-long effort from our entire school community to showing love for our neighbors through acts of service, we partnered with Christ House in Old Town to collect food to prepare 50 Thanksgiving Meal Kits, collected hundreds o pounds of food in a month-long food drive, and shared love and service to our neighbors all month long in and out of school. It brought us great joy to see the many ways our students and families participated in these activities.

Once again, we’re sharing our "What we're reading..." Blog , with what we hope is a variety of inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing materials. It is our hope that these pieces continue to help to shape our ongoing conversation about how we create and build our culture together at home and at school. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!

Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us in these ongoing conversations and for sharing items you have read that may be inspiring to others in our ILS community! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

What We're Reading - November 2020

As temperatures have turned fall-like, we have also passed the mid-term of the first trimester of the year. It was so wonderful to have the opportunity to meet with parents to discuss how we are working together to support your children during our first Parent-Teacher Conferences, and we also loved welcoming parents virtually for our first Lower School Showcase of the year. It remains a blessing that we are able to continue to hold many of these events and traditions that are so much a part of life together at ILS, even if we have to adjust and adapt this year.

Looking ahead to November, we have so many things we are looking forward to sharing together with students and families. We’ll be again hosting our Veterans Day “Salute to Veterans,” and we look forward to sharing the stories of many of our family members and friends who have served or continue to serve our nation in our armed forces. We’ll also be expanding our traditional “Day of Service” to a month-long effort from our entire school community to showing love for our neighbors through acts of service. We are partnering with Christ House in Old Town to collect for Thanksgiving Meal Kits, running a month-long food drive, and sharing love and service to our neighbors all month long in and out of school. We hope that all of our ILS families will join us in participating in these activities!

Once again, we’re sharing our "What we're reading..." Blog series, with what we hope is a variety of inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing materials. It is our hope that these pieces continue to help to shape our ongoing conversation about how we create and build our culture together at home and at school. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!

Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us in these ongoing conversations and for sharing items you have read that may be inspiring to others in our ILS community! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

What We're Reading - October 2020

Wow! It is hard to believe we’re already entering our 2nd month of the new school year. As we have all returned to some of the traditional rhythms and routines of school, we are also all still adjusting to new changes we’re all facing this year. While we are all missing some of our traditional opportunities to gather as a community in person and eagerly await the time when those can return, we remain grateful for the ways we are still able to connect and support one another as we serve our students.

We hope that you enjoy our monthly "What we're reading..." Blog series, with what we hope is a variety of inspiring, thought-provoking or intriguing materials. It is our hope that these pieces continue to help to shape our ongoing conversation about how we create and build our culture together at home and at school. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below as you read these!

This month, we are also looking forward to a number of great opportunities to connect with families. We will be engaging in meaningful conversations with our current families during our first trimester Parent-Teacher Conferences. Then, families interested in learning more about a classical, Christian education at Immanuel are invited to attend our first Virtual Admissions Open House on Friday, October 16th. Then, we will finish up the month with our first virtual Lower School Showcase of the year.

Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us in these ongoing conversations and for sharing items you have read that may be inspiring to others in our ILS community! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!

The Labor of Learning: Encouragement for Students from Mr. Barnett

Over the weekend, my wife and I went to the National Arboretum.  In the middle of this urban oasis are columns of sandstone topped by Corinthian capitals which used to grace a portico of the Capitol.  A plaque informed visitors that each capital required six months of labor to carve.  If such an eminent artifact of culture should require such sweat and tears, why would we expect the very basis of culture, a worthy education, to be any easier?  In a piece entitled, "Invitation to the Pain of Learning," Mortimer Adler wrote: "Without thinking, the kind of learning which transforms a mind, gives it new insights, enlightens it, deepens understanding, elevates the spirit simply cannot occur. Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful." 

One of the most daunting aspects of the labor of learning is the slow pace of the arduous work and the incremental, but often paltry results.  Yet, therein lies one of the greatest prizes of a true education: intellectual humility.  In his essay "The Parthenon and the Optative"--which I cannot recommend enough--C.S. Lewis describes two types of education:  "The one begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody; and it has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry.  The other begins in "Appreciation" and ends in gush.  When the first fails it has, at the very least, taught the boy what knowledge is like.  He may decide that he doesn't care for knowledge; but he knows he doesn't care for it, and he knows he hasn't got it.  But the other fails most disastrously when it most succeeds.  It teaches a man to feel vaguely cultured while he remains in fact a dunce.  It makes him think he is enjoying poems he can't construe.  It qualifies him to review books he does not understand, and to be intellectual without intellect.  It plays havoc with the very distinction between truth and error."

To our endless woe, the latter form of education seems to have prevailed in our culture at large.  Not at ILS. As this third week of school begins, the demands of learning have begun to make themselves felt for ILS sixth graders.  Now is the time for students to shake off the lethargy of summer dissipation and roll up their sleeves. The mountain they are climbing is steep at times, but the view at the top is unrivaled.

Meet Us Monday: Ms. Diane Curcio, P.E. Teacher

As the 2020-2021 school year gets underway, we’re continuing our Meet Us Monday Blog series to introduce you to our outstanding ILS teachers and staff. Check in each week to meet or better get to know one of our new or returning faculty members.

Today, we invite you go get to know ILS P.E. Teacher, Ms. Diane Curcio, with her recent “Meet Us Monday” interview.

Ms. Curcio returns to ILS this year after being away for a year. She teaches physical education to all students in grades Kindergarten through 8th grade.