All News

VIDEO: Eighth Graders Explore Food Systems Through Community Service Learning Trips
Mitzi Mock

In early November, eighth graders split into groups, piled into vans, and set off across the Bay Area to visit local organizations that are tackling problems related to food security and production. They dug out weeds and harvested leafy greens at a community garden, packed bags of pasta at a food bank, explored the concept of food as medicine at a local health care center, and even simulated experiments at a startup for lab-grown fish.

These trips were born from a conversation the eighth-grade teaching team started last year. In response to student feedback, the teachers were looking for ways to more deeply connect community service with student curriculum; students were hungry for meaning and action. The answer: community service learning (CSL) trips informed by the food systems curriculum students have been learning all semester long.

 

 

 

 


Read More

Catching Up with . . . Emily Goldberg

Emily Goldberg began at Nueva in March, joining our community as the middle school counselor. We chatted with Emily about her hopes and goals in her new role, her path to Nueva, and what she loves about working with middle school students.

Middle Schoolers Calculate Carbon Impact of Hillsborough Campus

Stepping into Tim Varga’s middle school biogeochemistry class feels like entering into a graduate-level course. For months, these middle school students have been working to quantify the carbon cycle for the Hillsborough campus, with different students responsible for different parts of the project to help create the whole picture.

Catching Up with . . . Cliff Burke

Cliff Burke joined Nueva at the start of the 2020–2021 school year and teaches writing in the middle school. We sat down with Cliff to discuss his teaching practice, collaboration with his teammates, and the experience of joining the community at such a unique and challenging time to be a student and educator.

Catching Up with . . . Molly Hasegawa

Molly Hasegawa is in her third year as a member of our middle school math team. We recently sat down with Molly to discuss a little bit about her love of math and the role community plays in her life and teaching practice, and to learn more about some work currently being done by our middle school math students.

Watermelons and Slinkies and Eggs, Oh My: Sixth Graders Explore Newton’s Laws by Dropping Items Over a Six-meter Balcony

Ask many Nueva students who have completed the sixth grade what a highlight of that year was for them, and you can expect to hear them talk about the Egg Drop in their physics class. Considered by some as a Nueva middle school science “rite of passage,” the Egg Drop is a culmination of weeks of learning, brainstorming, prototyping, iterating, and testing in which students apply Newton’s Laws of Motion.