News and Media
It's Mini-mester Time
Students are in the thick of Peck’s 4th annual Mini-mester this week. Mini-Mester—a weeklong design-intensive learning experience stimulating creativity, resilience, collaboration, and critical thinking—engages students in a variety of project-based activities. During Mini-Mester week, students take shortened classes in their regular subjects in order to accomodate a long period each day immersed in a world of inquiry, inspiration, trial and error, and fun.
“The projects they will participate in require their math, science, writing, research, and computer skills, as well as the kind of intensive collaboration, out-of-the box thinking, and creativity that fosters the growth mindset necessary in today’s world,” said Daisy Savage, Head of the Upper School.
This year, fifth grade students are designing and constructing actual working models of pinball machines. Throughout this academic year, as a class, they have been grappling with the essential question, “What makes a civilization.” In the design of their pinball machines, they must incorporate something that alludes to this question. (For more on Essential Questions and the role they play at Peck, visit the digital companion to the latest Peck News here.)
Grade 6 students are working in teams to design chariots. Each chariot must accommodate at least one passenger and have a mechanism to support locomotion. The culmination of their project will be an actual chariot race in the Manzo Gymnasium on Friday afternoon, attended by the whole school.
Students in Grade 7 have been given the task of scripting, filming and editing a silent movie. For their subject matter, they have been asked to create a piece that somehow explores one of The Peck School’s core values – Respect, Loyalty, Perseverance, Empathy, Responsibility, and Honesty.
Our eldest students in Grade 8 are looking at the concept of arrivals and departures. They are examining the issue as it relates to certain contexts including the arrival and departure of students to Peck. They will be engineering potential solutions to areas of weakness they uncover.
All Upper School parents are invited to an assembly on Friday, January 25, to watch students present their takeaways from the week’s activities.
THE PECK SCHOOL
247 South Street | Morristown, NJ 07960973-539-8660
Northern New Jersey's timeless and transformative co-ed independent elementary and middle school education for grades K-8.
The Peck School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.