This week at Woodside Priory we hosted another tour for the program. This group was the largest tour group the priory program has hosted this summer, and the tour guides handled the crowd admirably. Among the group were several parents of the TA's, including Katrina Wang's family who had flown in only hours before the tour from Beijing, as well as Mike Calbert, the father of this humble blog writer.
Sherri commented that this tour was much more organized than the Priory's previous one and that the timing was exact, getting the tour group out with minutes to spare while still giving them an insightful glimpse at the cogs and wheels of the Peninsula's "best kept secret."
My own father said that he was impressed with the program and was surprised that he had never heard of it before, even though it was in its twentieth year.
On a humorous note the last Priory tour coincided with the Halloween Spirit day, so the TA's had to give the tour while dressed up in their various costumes, which momentarily confused the tour group's members at the start.
Several of Priory's TAs were able to go and be apart of a tour of the Sacred Heart Peninsula Bridge site and see how they ran the program. It was extremely insightful to see where the Priory's eight grade Peninsula Bridge students were coming from, as Sacred Heart hosts seventh grade, and how they had been taught at Peninsula Bridge in the past. The tour was led by two Sacred Heart TA's who showed us all of the different classes in their enrichment program, ranging form a piano class to a cooking class (which used ingredients from Sacred Heart's personal organic garden). The tour was unable to see the academic programs in action since we arrived during the students' afternoon activities. But site director, Scott McDade, gave the tour an informative talk about the classes at Sacred Heart. One of the most impressive aspects of the tour was the dance class's performance of a dance they had choreographed themselves.
In other news at Priory, Mrs. Briggs' class finished up their picture story projects, writing several stories using elements of fiction such as tone, plot, and character. The narrative and descriptive aspects of the stories were very well done and the kids had a lot of fun doing it.
This week also marks the final day of the Fashion Elective. The dresses that the girls designed are currently being sewn together by our TA, Matt, who will bring in the finished products later.