Blog Archives

October 5, 2022

MPA’s Makerspace intentionally provides students with opportunities to construct meaning through making with practical, hands-on, interdisciplinary, problem-based projects. In this space, students of all ages use design thinking to develop empathy with individuals and design creative solutions to problems through an iterative process involving brainstorming, prototyping, and testing. The Makerspace allows for the blend of technical and creative skills conducive to developing a well-rounded individual.

Kindergarteners are experiencing the immersive magic that occurs daily in our Makerspace. For one of their first projects of the year, the eager students gathered around Mr. Braafladt, the Makerspace technology and innovation teacher. They watched in wonder as he carefully demonstrated their tasks and introduced the letter block activity.

The first letters that children learn are most often the ones in their names. In early kindergarten, names are used to practice letter recognition, syllables, counting, and so much more. In this project, Ms. Santiago’s class leveraged the Makerspace to take this foundational literacy work to a more creative and hands-on level.

For this experiential learning activity, kindergarteners were given small blocks of wood with the letters of their names outlined on them. Their challenge was to glue different materials over these outlined letters, producing unique and personalized art pieces.

Ms. Santiago explains, “Even though this project gave each student a beautiful end product, it is a prime example of a process-driven Makerspace experience for the students. Mr. Braafladt and I offered a wide variety of materials and intentionally left the rest up to the kids. They had to decide which material to use, how to best attach the material to their letters, and how to troubleshoot the problems that came up as they worked. Process-driven learning fosters creativity, independence, and perseverance.”

According to a Philly Art Center article on the importance of process-driven art for children, “If we show them an example and proceed to teach them exactly how to make their project the same as ours, we have only given students one answer to one question and both came from us. But if we instead give them materials and demonstrate the many ways they can use that material, we are posing questions and teaching them to find their own solutions in a world of possibility.” The Makerspace letter block project is an instrumental activity in developing autonomy for young MPA learners!

Tools For A Successful, Happy, And Healthy School Year

October 4, 2022

from Dr. Jules Nolan, MPA school psychologist

Among the excitement and speedy pace of returning to school, we tend to feel a lot of varying emotions. Friendships and routines are re-ignited, new ones are formed, and our students begin to settle in amidst change all around them. This fall, we asked Dr. Jules Nolan, MPA school psychologist, for advice on supporting children in a new school year to equip you and your family with tools for a successful, happy, and healthy year.

Dr. Nolan’s Top Three Tips
First, remember that anytime we experience big changes in our lives (new school year, new house, new baby) our brain goes into “safety” mode and spends thinking resources scanning the environment to ensure safety. This is a largely unconscious process but can manifest in our bodies like nervousness and feeling uncertain. During times like this, we are likely to be forgetful, feel scattered, and have a hard time initiating tasks or persisting when things get tough. In children and teens, this can look like low frustration tolerance, reluctance to try new things, high emotionality, tiredness, and so on. Our brains are calmed by routine, familiarity, pattern, and predictability. It is important to fortify your routines so that you are getting up and going to bed at the same time, eating at the same time, choosing clothes the night before, setting out what you need to remember the night before, etc. Essentially, your brain gets busy with seeking the familiar, and that makes it hard to make small decisions, remember things, and so on. Routine and structure calm the brain and this phase will pass quickly (a few weeks) if you focus on predictability, routine, and structure.

Second, remember that even if you have had a great and smooth “back to school,” after a few weeks of “honeymoon,” you may begin to see changes in your students like loss of motivation, lack of interest in studying, and lower performance. Remember that this is a good time to teach your children about motivation. Some people mistakenly think that intrinsic motivation (feeling motivated by the subject matter or the satisfaction of completing something) is the “good” kind and that extrinsic motivation (using tangibles, activities, or praise) is the “bad” kind. The truth is that people who use both kinds of motivation to do the things they don’t like to do–but must complete–are the most successful. Think of what you use to keep you working on things you despise (taxes, laundry, cleaning, etc). Often, we use external motivators to keep us engaged and that make us successful. The best motivators are those that your children choose themselves, but remember that work always comes first and the “break” time should be no more than a few minutes. We do best with many intervals of working and breaking rather than one long work period followed by a long break.

Third, be careful not to over-schedule your family. All of the activities and experiences we want our children to have can actually hinder development and lower confidence, especially in young children. A child who has structured lessons and coaching in several areas can come to feel that they are not good enough as they are. Dr. Lisa Damour, NYT bestselling author of “Under Pressure” tells us that we should think about what we could do at 100% of our effort, and then scale back to about 75%. Our teens can also easily get overscheduled. If your child’s sleep, eating, or socializing is suffering, you need to pare down their schedule. Read More

Homecoming 2022 Recap

September 22, 2022

Homecoming 2022: We Are Panthers was a huge success!

Thank you to students, parents, faculty and staff, volunteers, alumni, and friends of MPA who joined in to make this year’s Homecoming festivities a wonderful time for all. After a week of celebration and school spirit, Saturday was a festive day with MPA athletics, camps, and honoring MPA alumni.

Thank you to Olympian Mason Ferlic ’11 for leading many Lower School students who participated in our cross country clinic, and sharing his experiences as an MPA graduate and Olympian. Students loved the physical activity and joyfully shared their experiences “running a mile” and showing off their new skills.

More than 30 students also participated in the soccer camp led by Mr. Sheehan and Mr. Scinto. We loved watching parents cheering from the sidelines. Read More

From Host Family To Chosen Family

July 25, 2022

Nastya Vershenya ’01 and Sarah Hanson Salgado ’03 are each other’s chosen family. Their story begins in Sarah’s seventh grade year at MPA, when, as an only child, MPA’s call for families to host an international student was appealing and exciting. Both Sarah’s family and Nastya, coming as an international student to MPA from Minsk, were looking for the same thing, but none of them expected to gain a bonus sister/daughter in the process.

“Twenty some years later, she’s still a part of our family,” Sarah said. “Her [Nastya’s] daughter calls my parents her grandparents, and my parents refer to Nastya as their bonus daughter. We truly did gain a family member from the experience.”

We were able to connect with Sarah and Nastya together to share their heartwarming story as a host family and bonus family member.

How did you meet and become family?

Sarah found what she was searching for in a sister and friend in Nastya. “I’m an only child. When I was preschool age, my parents had done a couple college student homestays at our house. As a three, four, and five-year-old, that was really fun for me! I remembered liking that, and the summer after seventh grade, MPA sent out a newsletter looking for host families. I called my mom at work to say ‘Mom, you have to call MPA right now, and we’re gonna do this!’”

Nastya was drawn to MPA after her family’s experience with Friendship Force. Friendship Force connects families with others, staying with each other as host families for weeks at a time. Her family happened to connect with an MPA family, and they presented an opportunity for the international program to her.

The day Nastya was supposed to arrive in Minnesota, there was a massive airline workers’ strike. She couldn’t get to MSP, and had to reroute to Chicago as the closest available airport. Sarah’s family was so adamant about not delaying Nastya’s arrival, that at three in the morning they made the drive to Chicago to personally pick her up. Read More

Host Family Experiences: Ms. Stacy

June 30, 2022

Parent of alumni and fourth grade teacher DeeDee Stacy shares her experience hosting Lyndon Lyu ’20.

How did hosting an international student impact or change your family?
Having an international student in our home enriched our understanding of another culture first hand, and taught us that extending ourselves to those who need a place to live garners many rewards. The laughter, gratitude, and love that our student brought into our home resulted in an ongoing relationship that feels like family.

Do you have a special memorable moment you experienced while hosting your student?
There are countless memories worthy of sharing, because seeing MPA and Minnesota through the eyes of a new comer was delightful. When our student entered our home for the first time, he went into the living room and and twirled around, saying, “Thank you for letting me live here. I just love this house!” At the end of his first year here, when he learned that as a junior he might not have the same Lower School buddy, our student asked if he could write notes to the young student to let him know how much he enjoyed their time together. The connection to the community was obvious in so many ways. Read More

Students Charting Their Own Course

June 7, 2022

Since its founding, MPA has pioneered whole child education in the Twin Cities with a commitment to helping students deepen their understanding of themselves and the world around them. We persistently innovate in alignment with that core value, providing experiences that are challenging to replicate anywhere else.

One of MPA’s visionary programs is the Graduate Certificate of Distinction (GCD). It inspires students’ educational quests in one of four areas: Global Studies, Science Technology Engineering Math & Design (STEM), Fine Arts, and as of this year, Literary Arts. Consistent with the essence of student voice, where students actively shape curriculum and impact their education, MPA encourages and recognizes excellence that takes place outside of our already rigorous curriculum. The GCD program was designed to provide committed students a way to formalize their work. Further, it embodies MPA’s willingness to encourage engagement between students and teachers. A journey of passion, commitment, and hard work, the amount of individualized engagement required to successfully support Upper School students who pursue this challenge can only be offered by a dedicated faculty that interacts one-on-one with each candidate.

“Over the years, Upper School faculty and administrators observed amazing kids pursuing what could only be described as ‘passion projects’—students who dove into fields purely to spend time deepening their understanding,” faculty advisors Kari Kunze (Global), Lisa Buck (Fine Arts), and Jane Anderson (STEM) share. “They were not necessarily those with the highest test scores or GPAs, but students who were independently driven to quench their own thirst for knowledge.”

The GCD program is not a one-size-fits-all concept, nor is it for the majority of students. It’s a time-consuming experience for juniors and seniors who are already naturally exploring multiple subjects in depth. And it’s clear that the student must be leading the process to make this work.

“If you imagine the candidate in front of the line with the advisor close behind and their family supporting from the rear, that’s a good model,” observes Buck. The faculty advisor serves as a sounding board or brainstorming partner and parents can help by factoring their student’s area of passion into family activities, but ultimately, the student is responsible for seeking out new experiences that support the GCD honor. “What those kids offer, in terms of sharing what they’ve pursued, is extremely inspiring to us as teachers and advisors,” says Kunze. “The role of the faculty is to incite curiosity, help build confidence, and cheer them on, but we gain a great deal in the process,” Buck adds.

Class of 2018 alum Pranay Somayajula, now at The George Washington University, shares that he chose to pursue the Global Certificate and “the most valuable part of the program was the way it motivated me to get out of my comfort zone and explore the full range of cultural and foreign-policy opportunities the Twin Cities has to offer.” Maija Olson ’17 reflects on her Global Certificate as well, saying, “The freedom to guide my learning offered a new kind of independence. I enjoyed the ability to deeply explore various world issues and focus on something I was truly passionate about.”

The final presentations have turned out to be transformational for students–sometimes unexpectedly. Even when candidates were extremely nervous to get up before their teachers and present their reports at the end of their senior year, there is an evident level of maturity and empowerment along with a feeling of great accomplishment once they were done.

Alex Esch ’18 remarks that although she would’ve completed all the necessary hours in the Fine Arts area because of her personal interest, “The presentation requirement was incredibly valuable because it gave me the opportunity to share my passion and all the work I completed with teachers and fellow classmates. It was amazing to feel the support of the MPA community—especially from my personal advisor, Ms. Buck—as I expressed my love of the fine arts. She was always willing to answer questions and just be there as part of my artist’s journey.” It is truly a unique opportunity to be recognized by academic elders who have served as mentors and who can now formally honor the students’ hard work and devotion to education.

These students are charting their own course—one that can’t be shown by test scores, GPAs, or more traditional forms of recognition. The GCD program takes whole child education to a deeper level, honoring the unique contributions and multi-faceted academic experiences of each candidate. We’re looking for students to push themselves out of their normal routine in order to build multiple capabilities that intersect.

For more information on MPA’s Graduate Certificate of Distinction program, visit moundsparkacademy.org/gcd.

Defining Character

April 18, 2022

At home, you teach your children values. Shouldn’t their school do the same? Respect and integrity are integral components of the Mounds Park Academy mission, and character development is woven into the MPA experience. Rooted in the idea that the human character is malleable and children are exceptionally capable of positively impacting the world, character has been taught as one part of the whole child at Mounds Park Academy since 1982.

Respect, integrity, and global responsibility are as central to the mission of the school as intellectual ambition and effective communication. Varied, creative, and always evolving, how each teacher approaches character education is as unique as their own DNA. Teacher autonomy applies to all disciplines at MPA and is highly valued by teachers and administrators alike. It relies on mutual trust and is based on the idea that teachers are professionals who know their students best.

When the desire for formal character education during the early, foundational years of MPA rose to the surface, in true MPA fashion, leadership turned to our in-house experts—teachers. A committee composed solely of teachers was formed to establish CHAMP, a cohesive program with a strong academic foundation. The key components of CHAMP (Character Happens At Mounds Park) still hold true today: a partnership between home and school is essential; character education is embedded into the full curricular and extracurricular experience; adults intentionally model the character we expect; strong character and positive behavioral choices should be practiced; and ongoing evaluation and evolution are needed to ensure the program’s viability. Seven character traits of the program were identified—friendship, compassion, respect, self-control, responsibility, cooperation, integrity—with inclusiveness, courage, and mindfulness being added in recent years. Read More

Diving Deeper Into Rigor With Purpose

April 7, 2022

As a top ranked college prep school, MPA has the responsibility to prepare students for college, and more importantly, for life. At every grade level, MPA finds a developmentally appropriate way to incorporate rigor–not just for the sake of a rigorous education, but to challenge students to push their limits, discover what they are truly capable of.

Being experts in their field, MPA teachers are tremendously passionate and dedicated to getting students to not only answer the “what,” but the “why.” They inventively design learning opportunities with real-world applications for our students. They equip their students to use their knowledge to make the world a better place.

This is rigor with purpose.

What does rigor with purpose look like?

MPA’s highly rigorous education does not challenge top students by piling on busywork, nor does it take away support and individual attention from a teacher. It’s about diving deeper.

It looks like PreK, our youngest students, digging into a dinosaur fossil lesson in the Makerspace to explore how the biology and science of the world of the past influences the one of the future.

It looks like Middle School students blossoming into freethinkers, discovering the independent freedom of being resourceful, organized, and adaptable as the guided lessons of early childhood give way to multistep research projects and open-ended discussions in their classrooms.

It looks like Upper School physics students venturing out into our community to address problems, and then reactively designing, engineering, and manufacturing 3D-printed tangible solutions to improve them and our overall physical campus. Read More

A Lesson In Standing Out

February 9, 2022

What is it about great teachers that makes them stand out?

In MPA Upper School teacher Mike Vergin, it’s a commitment to knowledge about his subject matter, synchronized with a sense of humility and a willingness to let students pursue their own interests (a major part of what defines him as an educator). His quiet, laid-back demeanor makes him approachable, but his students will assure you that he is incredibly passionate, whip-smart, and extremely sharp on a wide range of subjects.

Vergin has taught social studies at MPA for 24 years and has been an MPA parent for 15. His current classes are ninth grade Honors World History, AP World History 10, World Religions and Constitutional Law. He has also helped coach MPA’s award-winning Debate and Speech Teams.

Vergin upholds the MPA tradition of sparking vibrant discussions in the classroom, and he credits his debate experience to making all the difference in his ability to credibly see and present both sides of an argument. He appreciates it when his students take risks by leaving their comfort zones and engaging in discussions on important but controversial topics. “Here you can disagree, you can evolve in your thinking, and you can question your original stance. This is a place where being curious and informing yourself is cool, and we hold space for the messy process that it sometimes takes to fully develop a position.” Read More

Building Early Childhood Skills During the COVID-19 Pandemic

January 27, 2022

To say the least, parenting young children has presented many new challenges throughout the last two years. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in fewer opportunities for children to interact with their peers and develop independence. As students ages three to five prepare to attend PreK or kindergarten at MPA, many parents have questions and concerns about their child’s social and emotional readiness during this challenging time.

We are here to say, fear not! Young children are incredibly resilient, and they will rapidly make up for lost time. We have assembled some suggestions to help you ease into preparing your child for school this fall.

Start With Play
Young children learn best through play and thrive on interactions that help them grow. Playing make-believe is an excellent way for young children to learn and practice new skills. Pretending together provides an example of behavior for a child to emulate. Here are some fun ideas for learning opportunities disguised as pretend play:

Play “story time” and take turns telling a story while the other listens.
Go on a picnic, even if it’s indoors. Let your child use a lunch box
and practice eating and taking care of their leftovers and clean up
independently.
Pretend to be a new friend. Teach your child how to introduce
themselves, ask for the other person’s name, and invite the friend to play.
Have quiet time. This is a part of the PreK day at MPA. Even if your child
no longer naps, practice having some quiet time in the afternoon. Books, quiet music, and dim lighting can help them relax.