Our youngest ones have so much wisdom to offer us. Former librarian and now 3rd grade teacher, Rachel Brainin carries on the legacy of Sheila Sienicki and maintains the publication’s spirit. Rather than having students strive to be published, D-Escribe is an open opportunity to explore writing prompts and styles. Teachers mainly submit work from the Units of Study, while also offering students creative prompts to play with style and content.
“Writing is sometimes very prescribed, so the open-ended prompts provide us with more exciting stories. I had a kid who didn’t like to write but then couldn’t stop writing about dinosaurs. In any free moment he had, he would say, ‘can I work on my dinosaurs?’”
Rather than having students strive to be published, D-Escribe is an open opportunity to explore writing as an artistic medium. Rachel hopes to continue to build upon D-Escribe’s wonderful history and to continue to inspire young students.
Sixth Grade CFA Partnership
The Sixth Grade has a long relationship with the Center for Food Action Garden in Englewood. This garden supplies fresh, organic produce to families struggling with food insecurity, adding variety to their diets and supplying essential nutrients. This garden was first...
Sixth Grade Science
In sixth grade science, students start off the school year by learning how to make scientific observations. This allows them to explore our campus and garden, gather data, and understand the natural world and the processes that govern it. The scientific...
Apiary
Dwight-Englewood maintains two colonies of honey bees located near the Nettie Coit Garden. There is also a much smaller demonstration hive located in the Library, where one can see the bees moving about within the hive, which is made of glass. These bees pollinate...
Pollinator Border
The Nettie Coit Garden is surrounded by a pollinator border full of plants designed to attract bees, monarch butterflies, and other pollinators. These pollinators, attracted by the flowers in the pollinator border, go on to also pollinate the various vegetables in the...
Nettie Louise Coit Teaching Garden
The Nettie Lousie Coit Teaching Garden is a large organic garden situated on campus. As the name suggests, the primary purpose of this garden is to educate students and community members about sustainable agricultural practices such as crop rotation, cover cropping,...
Compost Arena + Initiatives
The Compost Arena has been growing exponentially, going from two tumblers to ten in just six years, in addition to moving to a new location in 2023. Currently, the compost arena has enough room to process a majority of compostable food scraps from the kitchen and the...
The Greenhouse
The Greenhouse, built alongside the Hajjar STEM Center, is a teaching space and laboratory for many groups: DIG and Environmental Science classes, AIRS and Focus students doing research, and the Environmental and Garden Clubs. The space allows students to start...
The Green Building Spaces (STEM, MS – LEED Certified Buildings)
Dwight-Englewood is proud to have two of its buildings LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified, awarded by the USGBC (U.S. Green Building Council). The first building, the Hajjar STEM Center – more commonly known as “STEM” – consists of seven...
US Garden Club Completes Rehabilitation of Lower School Garden Bed
The US Garden Club has been working hard over the past few weeks to rehabilitate the Lower School Garden, which had effectively been left fallow since the departure of long-time LS science teacher and avid gardener Beth Lemire. Now, the Garden Club has successfully...
US Garden Club Expands Relationship with CFA
On April 12, the Garden Club took a field trip to the organic vegetable garden at the Center for Food Action. While the Sixth Grade has a long-standing relationship with the CFA, having been the ones to originally construct this garden, this was the first organized...
