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Nueva Stories

Every now and then we post interesting stories about Nueva and its Alums. If you have one, please email it to Matt.

This story comes from Lynne Greene: During the summer after our daughter's freshmen year in high school, she was still best friends with her lifelong Nueva friends. She invited her three best friends from Nueva to visit us on vacation. Each girl got off the plane with something creative and new to share with the others; a silk screening kit, a bag of recycled material from SCRAP in SF, and a sewing machine.

The four girls spent the week learning skills that none had ever tried before. They laid out the fabric, silk screened their own designs to create new fabric, figured out how to make an original pattern for clothing they designed themselves (yes, applied math was fully discussed), and then taught themselves to sew their own clothes. They were, and still are, simply amazing, talented can-do and will-do creative kids. Typically Nuevan!

As icing on the experiential cake, they sang in four part harmony while working together. They called a local restaurant that had an open mic night and asked if they could perform. They were told no, but decided to arrive in their new clothing and ask again. When they came up to the stage, the audience was clearly viewing them as young teens who had no business interrupting their evening entertainment. By the end of the first song, there was a hush over the crowd. They were awestruck at their talent and maturity. They sang several songs and left the stage to wild applause. The owner of the restaurant asked them to return again.

It is in juxtaposition to our next group of visiting friends that the Nueva influence on these girls was so clearly shown. A few weeks later, two new high school friends came to stay with us. As they came down the airport corridor to meet us, they were already plugged in to their iPods and texting on their cell phones. When asked about what to do during their stay, they wanted to go rent a video. They were both smart, nice girls, but the spark and gusto and creative life-force of the Nueva group was nowhere to be found.

Nueva Stories
Friday, 30 July 2010
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OUR STAFF:
Marilyn Kimura, Librarian
Peggy Clark, Library Assistant
Wendy Brown, Library Assistant
Jennifer Addiego, Cataloging Assistant

OUR MISSION:
To support the acquisition of reading and research skills and promote the growth of literacies for gifted students from pre-Kindergarten through 8th grade.

OUR GOALS:

Reading:
To develop a community of dedicated, passionate readers who experience joy in reading. We look to empower students to find those books that speak directly to each individual and to enable readers to experience gratification, competence, and pleasure in reading as they interact with text to create meaning. We look for development of aesthetic criteria along with comprehension, and seek to expand and enrich our students' lives with literature and art from the diverse cultures and time periods of our human existence.

In Lit Club, founded in 1982, students in grades 2-8 have opportunities to practice reading strategies and literary analysis in small groups. Lit Club groups meet weekly for an hour with trained parent and teacher facilitators. Children are encouraged to read for pleasure, to develop a love of literature, and to share this passion with others in focused discussion based on personal response to text.

Our Adult Lit Club meets monthly, affording parents, staff, and friends time to socialize over book discussions.

Research:
To develop independent, self-motivated, disciplined learners who use critical and creative thinking to find out what they want to know. The research process is inquiry-based, and authentic projects provide students the opportunity to explore, select, understand, evaluate, and use print and electronic resources for information.

OUR POLICIES:
Our library materials are available any time the building is open and our library catalog is available 24/7 on the Web. In order to foster self-reflective independence, children from Kindergarten through 8th grade are responsible for deciding for themselves how many books to check out, based on their judgment about how many they can take care of. We strive to enable children to travel worlds through books. Balanced information, excellent writing, point of view, multicultural exposure, and different genres inform our selection of resources, as reflected in our Library Selection Policy (pdf download).

OUR RESOURCES:
The library houses 18,000 print and AV items, and electronic resources, to nourish and challenge our community of readers. Our web-based library catalogue, Gale Group databases with full text articles and ArtStor Database of images can be searched from computers at school or at home.  For our adult population, we have information and curriculum materials to support the faculty and a broad collection of parenting and gifted education references.

Search our library catalog.

Use our Gale Group databases.

Look at our student books wiki -- Jabberwiki
 
Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Nueva School is a nationally recognized independent school serving gifted students and emphasizing integrated studies, creative arts, and social-emotional learning. For more than 40 years, Nueva has remained committed to its original vision: to inspire a passion for lifelong learning, foster social and emotional acuity, and develop a child's imaginative mind. Nueva creates a dynamic educational model to enable gifted children to learn how to make choices that will benefit the world.