New this Year: Spanish & Japanese Clubs

Cedarwood started offering optional virtual clubs on Fridays for students this fall, as a way to connect with friends across the grades and expand interests outside of the classroom.

Last month we featured our Social Justice and Service Clubs, and this month we’re excited to share our new Spanish and Japanese Clubs! These clubs have been meeting since the fall of 2020, but new members are always welcome to “click in” to the Zoom meetings on Fridays!

Spanish Club
Grades 4-6, 10:00 - 11:00 am
Grades 1-3, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

It has been so wonderful and inspiring to adapt the Spanish Club to the needs of the moment!

In years past, this club has been a place for middle school students to experience crafts, art, and food of different Spanish-speaking cultures in an immersion environment.

This year, in opening Spanish Club to younger students, we’ve seen that it has been most popular so far with grades 1-3.

Spanish Club is still an opportunity to learn more about some of the many cultures and customs of the Spanish-speaking world. In a mix of Spanish and English, we learn folk dances, do artwork and crafts, and listen to stories and books written by and about people from these cultures.

The students have learned folk dances from Guatemala, Spain, and several regions in Mexico. They work hard and really get the gist of the steps and sequences!

They have also had the opportunity to sketch works of art by Diego Rivera and Jose Antonio Velasquez.

Señora Michelle has been reading books in English to them as they draw. These books are written by Latinx authors and give glimpses of different aspects of life in Spanish-speaking areas of the world as well as the experiences of the Latinx community in the U.S, and include titles such as:

How Tía Lola Came to Stay, Julia Alvarez
My Name is Maria Isabel, Alma Flor Ada
Juana & Lucas, Juana Medina
Juana & Lucas, Big Problems, Juana Medina
Sofia Martinez Series, Jacqueline Jules
Once Upon a Time, Traditional Latin American Tales, Reuben Martinez
The Storyteller’s Candle, Lucia González

With our current Connected Learning schedule limiting the amount of time students spend with their subject teachers, it has been special — and fun! — for Señora Michelle to get some extra time with the students on Fridays.

All are welcome to join at any point in the year!

Origami Club
Grades 1-3
Fridays, 10:00 - 11:00 am

Cedarwood children love origami!

While origami is a part of the curriculum of Japanese class, in Origami Club the children try various ways of forming origami every week, with the goal of building relationships with each other and enjoying origami. Sometimes it is difficult, but in such a case the children give advice to their friends and the group cooperates with each other to make origami throughout their time together.

So far, the club has made Halloween origami, fortune tellers, animals, and so on. Right now, they are working on a dinosaur project!

All students in grades 1-3 are welcome to join Origami Club at any time; please remember to bring your own origami paper when you do.

Culture Club
Grades 4-6
Fridays, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

At Culture Club, Kumiko Sensei presents Japanese culture in a way that children can relate to. From time to time, the club also studies history and origami (at the student’s request!). So far, the group has explored Japanese life, Japanese events, Kanji letters, travel to Japan, how to spend December in Japan, and the Osechi dishes. Recently, the students learned how to cook mochi during their Japanese classes, so Kumiko Sensei introduced other dishes that use mochi.

Every Wednesday or Thursday, Kumiko Sensei posts the content of the Culture Club in the Japanese Parent Hub; if anything is needed for participation in that week’s club, it will be posted there!

Michelle Jarvis was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. After living and working as a professional ballerina in Mexico and Europe for eight years, she returned home to start a family. Michelle brought her love for and expertise in the spanish language to Cedarwood Waldorf school in 1998 and has been an integral part of the development of the school ever since.

Besides teaching spanish, she has played a role in many aspects of the school over the years, including after-school care, office management, enrollment, personnel management, faculty leadership, board development and teacher development. Both of her daughters are graduates of Cedarwood and Portland Waldorf high school. Michelle is a graduate of the Rudolf Steiner College foreign language teacher training and currently hosts an annual conference for developing world language teachers.

She is an avid reader, knitter and dancer.

Kumiko Sammler is from Tokyo. After graduating from Meisei University with a Bachelor of Education, Kumiko taught in the Tokyo area for 18 years. As a first year teacher, she read a book about Waldorf education and found the style was unique and totally different from Japan’s education style.

Now she is here, 20 years later, teaching at Cedarwood Waldorf school. She has done KENDO (Japanese bamboo sword) for 20 years, obtaining a level 4 rank. She was invited to a DOJO in San Francisco as a guest teacher. Last January, she demonstrated how to make Japanese green tea as an adviser at PSU. Her Tokyo neighborhood hosts the Kanda Matsuri festival once every other year, and she has carried an omikoshi since she was a child.

She really enjoys sharing Japanese culture.