The heart of any school is its faculty—those committed men and women who are dedicated to the education of hearts, minds, and souls.

We are grateful for the many ways in which these parents support the daily work of our faculty and staff, and continue to be inspired by the ways in which they support and encourage each other.

Poetry, in particular, is an aide to learning. By requiring children to decode language that is presented in a distinct and non-colloquial manner, poetry strengthens a student’s capacity for decoding language and diagnosing text in a way that prose cannot. It also introduces students to a use of the language they would not have otherwise imagined—and provides them with inspiration and a model for their own creative employment of terms, imagery, and linguistic device.

In order for students to read critically, they require not only reading skills, but the kind of content knowledge that allows them to ask meaningful questions of what they are reading—otherwise, they will be ill-equipped to encounter and reason with new information. It is understandable that wanting to provide young students with material that is developmentally appropriate might lead educators to expose them only to the kind of information that they can grasp thoroughly and completely. But this impulse may deprive students of the kind of intellectual background knowledge that they will one day invoke to make sense of new and more sophisticated material.