Academic Festival Week at Casa Bernabé Christian School
We recently celebrated our seventh annual Academic Festival at Casa Bernabé Christian School. Students from all our Primaria and Básicos (elementary and middle school) grade levels, including our Special Education classes, participated in Spanish and English spelling bees, math competitions, poetry recitation, elocution, and singing exhibitions.
It's a week dedicated to enhancing our students' talents beyond the classroom and remembering that playful learning is a valid and powerful tool to value multiple types of intelligence.
The staff member in charge of organizing the week is Flor Crispin Orellana, our educational psychologist (who you may remember as a previous Featured Staff Member a few months ago). She supports our teachers by providing them with materials tailored to our Special Education students' needs, and she also offers parenting trainings to some of the families from the local community whose children attend the school.
We asked Flor to describe the Academic Festival and the heart behind the week.
The main objective of this week is to strengthen communicative, linguistic, cognitive, and artistic skills, giving students the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned through challenging and fun experiences.
Each activity was designed to foster oral expression, comprehension, logical reasoning, self-esteem, and an appreciation for art and culture. It also seeks to encourage healthy competition, teamwork, and the development of critical thinking.
A week like this offers our students for whom seated classroom learning may be difficult an opportunity to display their success and show the new skills they've developed this school year. We have kids of all different academic levels at our school, and activities like this are essential to appreciate their unique learning styles and gifts.
Teachers prepared the students ahead of time for the various activities they would each participate in. For our community students who live with their families, parents and caregivers helped them study and were invited to watch the competitions and exhibitions. Our Casa Bernabé house parents helped our on-campus kids with their preparation, and when the day came they were all excited to show off what they had learned.
Various staff members served on the judging panels for each competition level, and they had a fun time out of their normal routines enjoying the kids' skills. Some of the competitions were fierce – the Básicos kids went 16 rounds in their English spelling bee before a winner was crowned. The top three places in each category and level were recognized with gifts donated by various sponsors, and participation certificates were awarded to all contestants as a testament to their efforts.
Weeks like this not only enrich academic learning, but also allow each student to discover new interests, build confidence, strengthen their social and emotional skills, and celebrate learning as a community. The Academic Festival is a living example that teaching can also be about playing, creating, expressing, and sharing, and it reminds us how thankful we are for our amazing, dedicated teachers.
Thank you so much for your faithful prayer and financial support of our school! As you can see from these photos, your generosity is helping more than 350 kids from inside Casa Bernabé and the surrounding community receive a high-quality Christian education they would not otherwise be able to access.
In a nation where the average student doesn't finish their sixth year of school, the advantage of an education cannot be overestimated. To read more about our school and learn about becoming an Education Sponsor or Teacher Sponsor, click HERE.
One of the top poems of the week was written by Santi Salguero, Sara and Edgar's 12-year-old son. He staged a passionate performance of the words he penned from a lifetime of firsthand experience of all that Casa Bernabé means in the lives of everyone who calls this special place home:
Oh Casa Bernabé,
Refugio de amor y luz
(Refuge of love and light)
Donde el dolor se convierte en esperanza
(where pain turns into hope)
y los sueños vuelven a florecer
(and dreams flourish again)
Allí los niños caminan sin miedo,
(There children walk without fear,)
sabiendo que el Señor su Dios está con ellos
(knowing the Lord their God is with them)
Allí la fe renace, recordándonos que
(There faith is reborn, reminding us)
siempre es posible volver a empezar
(it is always possible to start again)