What a Week! Highlights From the Start of School

The first week of school has been a wonderful whirlwind of activity! New classrooms are humming, the campus is buzzing with energy, and students are getting into the groove. What's more, our beautiful campus — with the new Middle School building completed earlier this year, the refreshed grounds, and renovations to our Middle School English room — is truly firing on all cylinders. We are ready to fully Celebrate the Journey, one of our core community values and a theme we'll revisit throughout the year.

This year's first week included a kindergartner naming her first new friend by day three, a class of second graders getting their hands on base-ten blocks for the first time, third graders reading their own names back to themselves in acrostic poems, and eighth graders trading stories over lunch while quietly gearing up for a fall backpacking trip to Hetch Hetchy.

Real rigor, from day one.

MTS students don't ease into academics with worksheets and busywork. 

First Grade Math

Our first graders started the year building the foundational skills of sticking with a challenging problem, collaborating as a team, and reflecting on how well they worked together. (The kids even helped create their own partner-work rubric!) They tackled problems like counting ice cream flavor combinations and tricky number-placement puzzles — tasks with no single "right way," on purpose, so kids build stamina and flexible thinking rather than rushing to an answer. Skills like this are exactly the kind of human intelligence kids will need most going forward, no matter what else changes around them.

Departmentalized from the start.

Even our kindergartners don't have just one teacher. In their first week, they met the specialists who will shape their year in Spanish, music, library, performing arts, and PE, in addition to their homeroom teacher. That structure, more common in middle and upper schools, starts here on day one, so students build relationships with multiple trusted adults early and get to know what it feels like to be known by a whole community of teachers, not just one.

We keep kids young — on purpose.

In an era when so much pulls children toward screens and toward growing up faster, MTS is intentional about protecting the parts of childhood that matter most: unstructured play, nature, and time spent with actual humans instead of devices. You could see it all over campus this week.

Down by the new garden, students have new ways to play at recess: a second ping pong table and a cornhole set have joined the mix, alongside a volleyball net that's already become a fast favorite with kids of all ages. These join the spaces that make recess at MTS what it is — nature play, our gaga pit, hoops set at different heights so every age can play, the Covered Courtyard, and the climbing structures on the Green Top. And right around the corner, Jim de Carion's newly renovated Humanities classroom is ready for another year of big ideas — one more sign of a campus that's truly firing on all cylinders this fall.

Building Community

Our community came together shortly after the first day of school for the Back-to-School Picnic at Piper Park. More than 250 people — students, parents and guardians, and the professional community — turned out to reconnect, meet new families, and kick off the year together. The food trucks did not disappoint, dessert went fast, and we couldn't have asked for better weather.

Here's to a year full of more moments like these.