Celebrating Childhood

By Rose Helm
This week and next, our students will be participating in that favorite of February activities: exchanging valentines. I loved Valentine's Day as a kid—decorating my shoebox to bring to school, hoarding all the Conversation Hearts with the best messages, and delighting in what designs my friends would choose for their cards (Garbage Pail Kids or Strawberry Shortcake?). While we won’t have the shoeboxes this year, we still take time out of our regularly scheduled lessons to let our students participate in these childhood rites of passage.
One of the things I love about being a K-6 school is that we celebrate this very special time of childhood. Whether it’s devoting classroom time to exchanging valentines in February or building leprechaun traps in March, we know that these are the moments our children will remember with fondness as they grow older. Thinking back on our own school years, we likely don’t remember individual math or writing lessons, but we probably remember our Halloween costumes, songs we learned for school performances, and games we played at recess. I, for one, remember spending many consecutive recesses choreographing dances for every track on Madonna’s album “True Blue.”

I often talk about one of the unspoken values of JTD being simplicity. It’s funny because any classroom teacher will tell you there is nothing simple about celebrating holidays like Halloween or Valentine’s Day. But the fact is that we also know that sometimes joy comes from simple pleasures, like having your birthday announced to the whole school at morning assembly or having your parent be the guest reader in your classroom. While school this year has been anything but simple, I hope that in time, the face masks and hand sanitizer will fade from our children’s memory and instead they will have only visions of cards and candy.

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The John Thomas Dye School


11414 Chalon Road
Los Angeles, CA 90049
Phone: (310) 476-2811
The John Thomas Dye School admits students of any race, color, religion, sexual orientation, or national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the School. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sexual orientation, or national and ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic or other school-administered programs.

Located In Los Angeles, CA, John Thomas Dye is an independent school for grades K-6. Students benefit from a challenging academic program, fine arts, competitive athletics, and a wide selection of extracurricular activities.