Brightworks Blog

Brightworks is a flurry of activity and we are thrilled to share peeks into the lives of the students, our school and the community.

Featured

Beyond Grades: How Brightworks Prepares Students for Life

Choosing a Right-fit School for Your Family

Explore our neighborhood

The Art and Architecture of Brightworks Project-Based Learning

Unhurried Afternoons - After Care at Brightworks

Creative Studios: tools for expression

Why Community Matters

Finding the Right School for Your Family

Carving Club Starts! Monday afternoons

Embracing Nature: Have you seen our Playground?

Summer - The San Francisco Library

Learning Naturally

Welcoming our New Head of School

Gender Expression & Expansiveness

Immersive Multi Day Event

We continue to proudly support our founder @gevertulley and his international outreach! This time we welcomed representatives from The PBL Institute of Japan, who spent a day with us to learn more about Brightworks and our unique pedagogical approach

A big & heartfelt thank you to everyone who came out for our community potluck & get-together last week!

We celebrated our wonderful community by sharing some yummy & home made foods, dancing our hearts out, playing together & admir

We hope you all had a wonderfully spooky Halloween! Our students did their very best to get us in the right mood before the evening!

We all take great pride in this most BWX-ian of traditions where we make sure the spookiness is just right, everyon

$Give it up for our middle school students who did a bake-off for math! We loved to witness their pure delight, focused attention, trouble shooting & team work while simultaneously practicing fractions, measuring and everyday math skills! Take$

Our upper elementary school students are studying California Immigration History during the Exploration phase of our current Memory Arc! And they are doing it in typical BWX fashion!

After learning about California's immigration history they spent a

'Sit with it!' - A weekly excursion into The Presidio by our high school students who venture out to observe, sharpen their senses, find inspiration and write about it! Take a peek and imagine how this beautiful tradition serves as a bridge to develo

Melissa Nocero 9/25/17 Melissa Nocero 9/25/17

Finding Value All Over the Place

The Teal Band began their second week of the Coin Arc exploring US dollar bills in pretty much every way they could think of. Hearing there is an owl hidden in the corner of the one dollar bill, the band called on Rich to lend them a dissection microscope to take a closer look. They all agree they saw one. We tried a number of techniques to look closer at the security thread in the $5, $10, $20 and $50 bills. The band looked for all the anticounterfeiting techniques used in the bills they were examining. These included the security thread and watermarks, as well as unique serial numbers. We recorded details of each bill we examined, including mottos, symbols of value, and drawings of people and places. Sometimes we even became the old, white men we found on the bills. Reflecting on the symbols of value we found on the dollar bills the previous day, we went on a scavenger hunt for them and other symbols of value in the Financial District along with the Violet and Amber Bands. We certainly found a large number of eagles adorning the massive buildings, housing everything from banks to Starbucks to gyms. We learned about William Alexander Leidsdorff, a West Indian immigrant of African Cuban ancestry. He built the City Hotel, the first hotel in San Francisco, and the first commercial shipping warehouse, along with becoming San Francisco's first treasurer. Leidsdorff was also one of the earliest supporters of San Francisco's public school system. He was good with money and knew where to put it. Continuing to look beyond just monetary currency in regards to symbols of value, we stopped to observe and take rubbings of our Zodiac signs in front of a Wells Fargo bank. It's interesting to find out how different people value their Zodiac sign and the qualities attributed to them. Moving on from the Financial District, we took our exploration of symbols of value to the SFMoMA. We found value in the artwork we encountered, especially those focused on sound. We valued the calm, meditative qualities of the bowls beautifully chiming as they came together in Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's clinamen. Many of us even discussed how we could build our own at Brightworks. Exploring a number of other works of art in Soundtracks, we reflected on how much we value our ability to hear. It is amazing to explore a piece of art, both silently and when accompanied by sound. We learned about Wells Fargo's stagecoach history of carrying money, people and mail across the US. How many times have you screamed, "SHOTGUN!" in hopes of riding in the front passenger seat of the car. Well, if you rode in that seat on the stagecoach, you'd certainly need a shotgun since it was your job to protect the bags of gold and money tucked under your feet. After all this money talk, who doesn't value a day out at the ballpark with their friends? The Teal Band certainly values it, especially when tickets are as cheap as $6 a piece. We also value getting the chance to see how our hands compare to those of Barry Bonds. Thanks to our early arrival, we were able to make our way down next to the visiting bullpen mound. Getting this close to the field and the players afforded us the first two baseballs we collected that day.